Assistant District Attorney William Gargan distinguished himself recently for questionable conduct and incompetence.
Both were prominent in his bringing a fraudulent felony charge against former Monroe County GOP Executive Director Andrew Moore, then suffering the almost unheard of professional disgrace of having the charge pulled by his boss, DA Mike Green, following Green's review.
True to character, Gargan yesterday made excuses for submitting the bill of particulars in the Moore case substantially late and for his unusual delay in submitting filings for yesterday's court hearing.
Gargan said he didn't want to file papers describing evidence claimed against Moore in order to avoid pre-election media attention:
• If you didn't want to inject politics into a prosecution, Mr. Gargan, then why, in the first place, did you bring this prosecution just before an election?
• If you delayed the filings that describe the very basis for your prosecution in order to avoid pre-election media attention, then why didn't you file the day after the election, instead of half a month later?
Surely you knew why you were indicting Moore before you did it, right? Or is it that, as we've suspected all along, you decided to indict first, and figure out why later? When you have no case and are making it up, it's hard to contrive something that looks like more than a joke, isn't it? Creative writing takes time.
• And Mr. Gargan: If politics has nothing to do with it, why were you boasting last summer that you really wouldn't want to be a Republican running this year, after what you were going to drop on them before the election?
These things get around, dear boy. You need to be more discrete.
Next up: The political payoff for this indictment, and how it relates to the prosecutor's deliberately late filings.
Learning an acquaintance had surgery for a tumor found to be benign, author Evelyn Waugh famously quipped: "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it."
We recalled this last week, reading a story in USA Today describing residents of towns near Buffalo so frustrated with government in New York that they want to reduce the size of their Town Councils.
It's yet another poignant, maddening irony of the farce passing for government in this state that the levels of government that citizens actually have power to change are the levels that work best. (Maybe that's why they work best.) Those levels of government that cry out to be changed -- the State government and that 80% of County government functions dictated by the State -- citizens can't touch.
In New York, it's the town and village governments that work best, irrespective of party control. They're the most responsive to citizens, and the most fiscally responsible. Surely the very worst town government in the state looks exemplary compared to the Albany regime.
It is a symptom of the frustration and despair to which the worst state government in the country drives its beleaguered subjects, that they target the only part of government they can affect, even though it works well. Apparently around Buffalo they've found the one part of government in New York that's not malignant -- and want to cut it out.
Testimony in the trial of former State Senator and uber-sleazebag Joe Bruno has brought out this stupefying, but completely believable, information: State legislators for years have deliberately hand-delivered their financial disclosure forms, because false information contained in the forms could be prosecuted as a federal crime if the documents were sent through the mail.
The noble legislators received advice to this effect from legislative legal counsel!
That was our first thought on seeing Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's essay in Sunday's Democrat and Chronicle, with the risible headline, "Protect Families from Higher Taxes."
Is there any more determined, intransigent, immovable tribune of the status quo supporting New York's aristocracy of public employee unions and their dependents than Sheldon Silver?
It's immediately apparent in his essay, pretending to support budget cuts to protect taxpayers. The Speaker can read the recent election returns. He understands the mood of New York's electorate toward taxes.
So Shelly attempts some serious posturing, because he, his union masters and his allies don't want anything to change. Silver makes it clear that the biggest spending items, the ones driving the State's brutal tax environment, are off the table. After detailing some trivial cost-cutting proposals, he continues:
[W]e must continue to invest in ... public schools ... and health care."
New York spends twice the national average on Medicaid at $2,283 per person. That is the highest average in the country, with Rhode Island a distant second at $1,659. Mr. Paterson wants to scale back the health care budget by $471 million. That seems the least the state should do. Education is even more costly. The national average per student is $9,138; New York spends $14,884. Mr. Paterson’s plan to cut education costs by about 3 percent, or $686 million, is clearly in line with what’s necessary.
New York's status quo is unique and debilitating. The aristocracy it supports, like all oligarchies, will not, as we noted last month, relinquish its privileges easily.
The Democrat and Chronicle is not accepting gracefully its side's massive loss in recent local elections.
Yesterday the paper belatedly gave some prominence to the fact that falsely-accused GOP Executive Director Andrew Moore passed a lie-detector test, showing he was telling the complete truth about the events used as the basis for his indictment in a Robutrad-related matter.
The headline ran, "Moore 'truthful' on test".
That must have been too much for someone at the D&C. Maybe it even prompted an annoyed phone call from the District Attorney's office. By this morning, the paper had changed the headline in its online edition to "Polygraph results expected to be part of Robutrad case."
The D&C forgot to make the change in its online index of archived stories, which still carries the original headline that shows Moore's innocence. (We wonder, who at the D&C's going to get chewed out today for this slip-up? Not to mention the slip-up on the original headline.)
Leave aside quibbles about the quotes around the word "truthful" in the original headline, which never would have appeared had this been about, say, a drunken Democratic City Council member trying to beat a rap on DWI. In that case of course, the successful lie-detector test would have been front and center, in repeated articles appearing before the election, not after.
In order to not lose the original headline to posterity, we've scanned the print edition of the story below.
Reading it, we savor all over again one of the sweetest moments of election night: Andrew Moore's successful reelection to Penfield Town Council, despite everything the Democratic Party - Democrat and Chronicle machine threw at him.
Tonight at 8:00 on AMC begins the remake of what was simply the greatest television show ever made: The Prisoner. A brilliant exposition of the indomitable will of one man against the state.
Assistant District Attorney William Gargan distinguished himself recently for questionable conduct and incompetence. 
