OP-ED/Michael Benjamin, @SquarePegDem: NY needs Preet Bharara to stay as US attorney and keep fighting corruption (http://t.co/FheVc3GjsE)
Preet Bharara remains New York’s best and only hope for uprooting corruption in politics and business. Yet he’s being touted as a successor to Attorney General Eric Holder.
At the recent Crain’s breakfast, Bharara joked that he’d asked his mother to stop calling newspapers and floating his name to replace Holder.Don’t go, Preet — New York needs you.
A century ago, another reform-minded, corruption-fighting New York crusader was trundled off to Washington, DC by the political bosses whose livelihoods he threatened.
In 1900, Albany powerbrokers arranged for immensely popular first-term Gov. Theodore Roosevelt to win the Republican nomination for Vice President.
Today, the heirs of those Albany bosses are probably working overtime to engineer Bharara’s rise from US Attorney for the Southern District of New York to US Attorney General. The Post has already reported that GOP senators are disposed to approve Bharara, should President Obama nominate him.
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There is no good reason for New Yorkers to permit our era’s Teddy Roosevelt to be trundled off to Washington, DC before he “dissolves the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.”
Don’t let the Albany bosses win.
Michael Benjamin is a columnist and blogger as well as a former state legislator who represented the 79 AD, 2003-2010.
Follow him at http://CorruptionCrusher.com/; Twitter:@SquarePegDem; and www.Facebook.com/SquarePegDem; www.YouTube.com/SquarePegDem; on Skype: SquarePegDem
