The Paterson Rumor And A Lesson From Kipling
- February
- 8
For the last three or four days rumors have been swirling that Gov. David Paterson will resign over a not-yet-published story in The New York Times that supposedly exposes in detail an affair the 55-year-old governor has supposedly been carrying on with a woman.
Denials that he is planning to quit have been pouring out of the governor’s office today. The Times has not commented about the speculation, so who knows what’s really going on in the political cesspool that Albany has become. One must weep for the Empire State which is bankrupt in more ways than one.
Anyway you slice it, there seems to be nothing but nuttiness in the strange saga of Paterson, the “accidental governor,” who was lieutenant governor briefly until March 2008 when Eliot Spitzer, aka “Client 9” stepped down in disgrace because of his cavorting with a high-class prostitute.
At the outset of his taking office, Paterson admitted to having had an affair with a state employee. According to recent reports, he has been seen fooling around with a woman on two occasions— at a New Jersey steakhouse and, of all places, in a closet in the governor’s mansion.
The national culture of narcissicism is now officially out of control. Some day Paterson’s wife will no doubt write a tell-all book, joining the wives of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and pretty boy John Edwards. Revenge is lucrative.
Judging from the book reviews and profiling interviews Sanford and Edwards guys are really getting “the business,” the full treatment of public ridicule. To put it crudely, their nuts are in a vice. These guys are wimps. They ought to man up.
A Rudyard Kipling poem comes to mind. I don’t know. It just seems apt.
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier – of- the Queen!”




Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.






