The mean streets of Glens Falls

I think it's about time for New York's Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno to bow out with whatever grace he has left.

I wrote earlier about his refusal to talk to The Times-Union on a story that revealed some dubious travel practices of his, only later to whine that the Albany paper didn't tell his side of the story. He also acted like he was in more danger than a GI in Baghdad. Late last year, it was revealed that Bruno was the subject of an FBI investigation into his outside earnings.

In the latest twist, Bruno claims that his archrival, Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer is spying on him. The state's top Republican compared Spitzer to a "Third World dictator."

It's been such a rough eight months that even having his very own taxpayer-financed ballpark named after him probably doesn't lift his spirits very much.

But despite the travails, the majority leader hasn't lost his pugnacity.

“I grew up in the toughest part of Glens Falls, next to the boxcars, where kids would come up to you when you weighed 90 pounds and they weighed 120 and just punch you right in the mouth just because you were Italian, O.K., or just because you lived next to the boxcars, or just because they felt like it,” he said. "That’s how I grew up, O.K.? So swing away.”

As a current resident of Glens Falls, I nearly wet myself laughing at this description. I know Glens Falls is less hardscrabble than it was in the '30s and '40s when the majority leader grew up. But give me a break? Did he grow up on South Street's bar alley?

Bruno is not the first politician to exaggerate the dangers of this relatively placid area for political reasons.

Businessman Bill Brown waged a campaign a few years ago trying to get the city to 'clean up' Ridge Street, which tried to convince people was more dangerous than East L.A. He is running for political office for the third time this year. And while I appreciate the work he does for the Boxcar Derby, he has never gotten my vote. And unless his opponent is named George W. Bush, he never will.

In 1996, the late-Congressman Jerry Solomon, berated Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy during a debate on a gun control bill in one of his more (but not by any stretch his only) infamous comments.

Our local loudmouth dared the nephew of the assassinated John and Robert Kennedy to "step outside," adding, "My wife lives alone five days a week in a rural area in upstate New York. She has a right to defend herself when I'm not there, son. And don't you ever forget it."

I used to bike by their house all the time. They lived in a swanky residential suburb, about a mile away from one of the busiest intersections between New York City and Montreal.

I must've missed the boxcars.


Full disclosure: apparently Bruno is distantly related to me, though I must declare unambiguously: I am not nor have I ever been a passenger on a state aircraft. I also have never been shot at by Mrs. Solomon.