| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| A Normal Guy Runs for Mayor |
| 2013-08-29 |
| [SPECTATOR.ORG] I know. I know. This puts me out of sync with the New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... and even the infallible New York Post, but if I were a citizen of New York and not just a monthly visitor I would be voting for John Catsimatidis, the jolly and jowly rumpled candidate whose name appears on both the Republican and Liberal lines. How he managed this I do not know. Maybe he is a Liberal of the old school, one of those who were not squeamish about being American and still believed in the country and the free-market system. Catsimatidis certainly does. He dropped out of college and became a billionaire. In so doing he benefited New York City with jobs, food, and philanthropy. While the rest of the fantasticoes running for high office in the Big Apple have enriched themselves for the most part from the public trough, Catsimatidis has enriched himself and the city the old-fashioned way through free enterprise and by paying taxes. The others in the race for mayor are for the most part figures from a cheap novelist's fevered imagination. Foremost among them is Anthony Carlos DangerWeiner ...aka Hot Dog Tony, the remarkably offensive sex maniac six-term New York congressman who resigned in 2011, then decided everybody had forgotten by 2013, when he decided to run for mayor of New York City... , a man who left Congress after he was revealed to be an exhibitionist. He went into some kind of therapy. Declared for mayor. And then exposed himself again and again. He is still running and presumably still in therapy. Then there is Eliot Spitzer, the heir to a vast fortune who had to leave his position as the governor of New York because he was caught paying for high-class hookers from his bank account. He is running for comptroller and is frankly self-destructive. If he wins it will be a close thing whether he destroys himself again before he destroys the business climate of New York. Both Democrats and Republicans fear him and both are right to do so. On the other hand there is Catsimatidis who every New Yorker would relish as a neighbor and who many New Yorkers actually have for a neighbor. At least they have someone who is a facsimile of Catsimatidis. He is as New York as you get. He dresses like New York, sounds like New York, and started his business in New York, which is now the Red Apple Group of grocery stores that has extended into the fuel business, the aircraft leasing business, and other enterprises, making him rich (132 on the Forbes list of wealthy Americans) and eager to give back in service to his city. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe." - Thomas Jefferson |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-08-29 10:22 |
| #1 There's no such thing as a healthy hive mind. All large cities, everywhere in the world are long term screwed... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2013-08-29 10:16 |