| I'm not sure, is it a requirement that to go from being a business executive to a politician, you need to get your brains stirred with a hot poker or something? Or is it simply that only the dumbest (and usually failed) businessmen decide to go into politics and run entirely on the platform of being a former businessman?
There's plenty of examples, but the most obvious recent one is Chris Collins. At the Governor's State of the State address recently, Collins showed up and sat down in a seat being held by Assemblyman Joseph Errigo (R-Henrietta). What happens next I'll leave to the WKBW article to describe.
Assemblyman Errigo says he's never had anything against Collins before this incident. Errigo would not identify the woman involved because he says he's concerned there could be repercussions for her. Errigo tells Eyewitness News he was saving a seat for the woman but she was late, so when Collins arrived he took the seat that was being saved. When the woman eventually arrived that's when the Assemblyman says Collins made the inappropriate comment.
"She comes up the aisle and now this is a very crowded situation here and so she looked at me and said, 'I thought you were going to save me a seat,' and I said, 'Well, I told you to get here earlier,' and he (Collins) says, 'If you want this seat you have to give me a lap dance'," says Errigo.
"If you want this seat you have to give me a lap dance." Yup, that came out of the mouth of the Erie County Executive, a man who wants to be Governor. In public, to a respected--as well as, apparently, wealthy and powerful--member of the Erie County community who is well known for throwing around political contributions.
I swear to God I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
As with Collins' previous gaffe, he is fortunately being called out on it by decent members of his own party--including Errigo, who was one of a number of people to attest to how offended the woman was at the comment. Unlike Collins' previous gaffe, he's not apologizing, instead trying to describe the media accounts as having been "fictionalized." Which is a far cry from saying "No, I didn't make a completely inappropriate and public remark to this woman about a lap dance."
Collins is just the latest example of what looks increasingly like a trend: morons leaving the business world for the world of politics. First there was Bush, who apparently convinced all the idiots whose wallets outweighed their brains that they could do it too, so long as they grinned enough and had good hair. At least to his credit, Bush didn't publicly joke about getting corporate executives to strip for him. Even he wasn't that gaffe prone.
Now we've got Collins, and our other blight on the region, Chris Lee, who continues to demonstrate on a near daily basis that he's either an idiot or intellectually dishonest. I'm going to go with idiot. Not to mention incapable of math.
Somebody save us from "good ol' boys" who think that their country-club grin makes them qualified to be leaders. |
