When Rick Lazio first became obsessed with the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero, it was clear he was trying to find a cultural wedge issue with which to gain ground on Andrew Cuomo and outflank his hard right opponent, Carl Paladino.
But he couldn't out-hate Paladino, a real estate millionaire who sends pornographic and racist emails to his friends for kicks, and who promised to use eminent domain to stop the Park51 project if elected, saying he would "make it a war memorial" rather than "a momument to those who attacked our country." Last night Paladino crushed Lazio with about two-thirds of the vote. He then took to the stage to offer this message:
“We are mad as hell,” Mr. Paladino said in a halting but exuberant victory speech in Buffalo shortly after 11 p.m. “New Yorkers are fed up. Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people's revolution. The people have had enough.”
A millionare businessman with a taste for coarse, racially charged emails, a big government hypocrite who wants to convert prisons into facilities for housing people on welfare and who attacks "the ruling class?" If a liberal were trying to come up with a really nasty, reductive caricature of what a Republican is supposed to be like it would look something like Carl Paladino.
