Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Media groupthink peaked last week as pretty much everyone with a pen decided to weigh in on whether New York's government is the most corrupt and dysfunctional, or simply a silver medal finalist.

The Guardian thinks Paterson was doomed from the beginning, what with the cocaine and the cheating. And we really didn't things would get much worse than that for the Governor, but we were wrong.

New Yorkers, once, had a dream: that the first African-American governor could help New York move past the Spitzer scandal and enact the progressive agenda they had elected the duo to bring to the state. Instead... they got another who allegedly used his position to intimidate a victim of domestic violence and failed to enact much of anything for the state. Next up to lead the state: the Democrat who accused President Obama of "shucking and jiving" and tried to deny that there was anything racist about that.

Newsweek ran with a ridiculous idea - instead of doing actual research and analysis, just let writers pick the states they *imagine* are the most corrupt. Bravo, Newsweek. Despite the half-assed editorial inspiration, Ben Adler's piece on New York is worthwhile.

All this corruption has a storied history. Boss Tweed, the infamous executor of the Tammany Hall political machine in the 19th century, had proudly proclaimed his business to be "honest graft." Tweed and his defenders maintained that the machine was just greasing the wheels of constituent services.

Maybe so, but nowadays New York's corruption does not make it function more efficiently or democratically. Albany is known for being a place where "three men in a room" (and, yes, they have always been men) make all state policy: the governor, the state Senate majority leader, and the speaker of the State assembly. Other legislators are virtually powerless, and, as Paterson shows, ill prepared to govern should the responsibility fall to them.

Ill-prepared indeed. The New Yorker, thankfully, uses actual numbers to make the case for New York's status as most corrupt.

Paterson is supposed to be leading negotiations to balance the nine-billion-dollar budget deficit that must be resolved by April 1st. It's as huge a job as it sounds. So is finding a way to deal with the 2.6 million New Yorkers--nearly fourteen per cent of the state's population--who do not have health insurance. The Governor is also supposed to be finalizing a big deal to bring a "racino" to Aqueduct racetrack, in Queens, but that has stalled because of accusations that he selected an inferior bid from a company in which Floyd Flake, a prominent pastor, is an investor. On top of all this, the State Commission on Public Integrity came out with a report saying that Paterson had violated ethics laws by cadging thousands of dollars' worth of World Series tickets from the Yankees. A lot of people would have thought this a relatively minor infraction had Paterson not, according to the commission, lied about the matter under oath and then produced a backdated check, as though he were a renter and the commission (which he once sought to abolish) a grasping landlord he was trying to outwit. According to the Citizens Union of the City of New York, since 2005 ten state lawmakers have left office owing to criminal or unethical conduct. Even the fate of Charles Rangel, the twenty-term congressman from Harlem--who, after it emerged that he had accepted corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, said that he was temporarily stepping aside as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee--was eclipsed by the shambolic proceedings of the boys upstate.

So, how do we clean up Albany? It's not going to happen before the budget is decided upon, which I think is a great test. We get to see which legislators are pulling their weight, and which ones are twiddling their thumbs. The Newsweek piece sums it up quite well, but doesn't give much hope for the future.

Every so often the corruption gets so egregious that a new generation replaces them, as when, in the 1980s, virtually the entire Bronx Democratic establishment was ensnared in various scandals, and a little-known city councilman named Fernando Ferrer was chosen, because he was the highest-ranking official with a clean record, to replace the disgraced borough president. This lasts for a few years, but in due course the reformers become the machine, and the process begins anew.

We're number one! We're number one! We're number one!