Grimm tidings

Via GoodOleWoody.

Michael Grimm, known to the Times as

a former F.B.I. agent and Marine who capitalized on his straight-arrow image to win a seat in Congress, 

or to Howie at Down With Tyranny as

Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, Gambino Crime Family mobster turned Staten Island GOP congressman, since 2005 when he had a tangential role in a hushed up case of New York mobster/real estate developer Tom "Gus" Kontogiannis giving Randy "Duke" Cunningham $400,000 to try to buy a pardon from then President George W. Bush

(I guess straight-arrow images aren't what they used to be), perhaps most vividly recollected for proposing to reporter Michael Scotto that he would "break you in half like a boy" but also for having spent 17 unexplained minutes with a ladyfriend in the bathroom at The Owls' Head in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (part of his district), should really be the protagonist of one of those new-style TV dramas devoted to exploring the moral complexity of our criminal and political classes: in the past few days he has been

• outed by MSNBC's Chris Hayes as a traitor to his party who believes in the reality of human-created climate change (Yay!), and
• indicted on 20 counts in a scheme to underreport workers' wages in his Upper East Side Restaurant Healthalicious (the restaurant had already been fined in a wage theft suit and everybody thought he was going to be busted for campaign finance violations, not that this news means he won't be).

It's the climate change thing that really gets to me. Lolwut?

Our Lady of Lourdes Chapel at New Dorp Beach, November 2 2012. Photo by Mike Segar for Reuters.

But then again, just because you belong to a criminal organization (I'm thinking of the House Republican Caucus, not the FBI or Gambino Family) doesn't mean you have to be dumb, or even vicious and sociopathic in all respects or totally indifferent to human suffering and the fate of the planet. Being concerned about climate change makes a lot of sense for a Staten Island politician, actually, given the devastation of Storm Sandy in 2012 (no, we can't say global warming caused the hurricane, but we can say it caused the rise in sea level—eight inches since 1900—that made the storm surge so much worse in combination with stupid housing construction in wetlands areas of the island).

I'm mindful that Illinois Republican governor George Ryan was busted for corruption of which people in the know had presumably been aware for years, just when he began crusading against the death penalty, and Republican Richard Nixon was thrown under the bus by the House of Representatives on February 6, 1974, exactly the same day that he sent Congress his proposal for universal health care (the Senate acted on the 7th). Even "Duke" Cunningham came under the FBI radar only after he had boldly—and successfully—stood alone in his party with the Clinton White House for government regulation on the cruel and wasteful practice of shark finning (well, about five years after). Is poor young sociopathic Mikey, similarly, getting the shaft from our invisible overlords for showing a little feeling for the environment?