Metro

Labeling Albany a circus is smear on Bozo

As the state of New York burns like a latter-day Rome, why should we worry?

It was Happy Hour once again at the state Capitol!

Albany this week was a goofy place. The Dumb, the Dumber, the Mentally Challenged, Morally Bankrupt and Outright Deranged — yes, that collection of chowderheads, convicted criminals and impotent squirts whom we trust to run our state — were dragged back to Albany, where they fiddled like it’s 1999 again.

Gov. Paterson, a k a Gov. Pipsqueak, was the voice of doom raining on the parade. He yelled into the wilderness that New York was just like Bosnia! No. The governor said it’s like Iran!

We’re about to run out of money! he cried. Nobody listened.

Then the gov squandered his last remaining shred of political capital by pushing for an incredibly urgent non-issue.

The life-and-death question of gay marriage? Well, no.

The governor starred in an important television commercial asking voters to re-elect him — a bit of timing so clueless, you wonder how this guy wound up sitting at the adult table, let alone in the governor’s chair.

Gay marriage, by the way, was put on hold. So was trimming government by even a dollar.

The one thing Senate Democrats actually did was vote to form a committee that could throw Sen. Hiram Monserrate into the wood chipper for beating his girlfriend. But less than 24 hours later, eagle-eyed Post state editor Fred Dicker spotted Hiram in the cafeteria yukking it up with two of the state’s most important senators — Majority Leader Pedro “Chuckles” Espada Jr. and Finance Committee Chairman Carl Kruger.

It was old-boy business as usual.

Gov. Pipsqueak is actually right. The state needs to make deep cuts in generous health and education budgets, or go bankrupt. But senators can taste the defeat in the next election, and smell their unemployment checks if they dare piss off the all-powerful unions. So nothing gets done.

Here are a few thumbnails of folks who sell your state down the river:

* Gov. Paterson. The Bozo-in-chief doesn’t have state senators laughing behind his back. They do it to his face.

* Sen. Malcolm Smith is to Senate presidents what Jimmy Carter was to president presidents. He was given the Miss Congeniality award in June to help end the revolt that paralyzed government, and put in a swell new majority leader . . .

* Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. The new leader is under state investigation for using his Bronx health-care business like a workfare center for his many relatives, and for living in Westchester. And he can’t stop smiling.

* Sen. Carl Kruger. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee lives on a planet in which money flows like the ocean, and nothing needs cutting. Ditto Democratic Conference Leader John Sampson.

* Sen. Hiram Monserrate. Newly convicted of gal-beating, he just wants to be loved.

* Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. He looks like a statesman next to these fools. Who’d a thunk it?

To say state government is a circus is an insult to respectable clowns.

We’ve been mugged.

An insult to our soldiers

They do a grave injustice to our men and women in uniform.

Reading about the butcher who murdered 13 innocents at Fort Hood in The New York Times, you’d want to sing a spirited chorus of “Kumbaya.” So sensitive was the paper to the “Muslim-bashing” endured by Major Nidal Hasan, I had to read almost to the jump to learn that he is accused of mass slaughter.

If you’d listened to President Obama earlier this week, you’d be just plain confused.

Before traveling to Fort Hood to comfort families of the dead and wounded, the president was loath to admit who the enemy was.

“They are Americans of every race, faith and station. They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers,” he said timidly of those who lost their lives. Yes, the killed and the killer were all the same!

This is an insult to those who serve in uniform — the vast majority of whom fail to assault, insult or harass Muslims. It should go without saying that our soldiers know the difference between the vicious killers among us, and Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East. They are not evil.

The enemy is.

This teacher has no class

I don’t know what Bronx teacher Greg Van Voorhis was smoking when he passed out copies of a Playboy magazine article about masturbation, autoerotic asphyxiation and garden vegetables to his high-school class.

The well-liked Van Voorhis has been suspended as the Department of Education investigates.

Teens may think it’s cool for adults to let them in on unusual sex practices. But normalizing this stuff in a pathetic bid to win youthful fans — making deviancy just another variant on the menu of acceptable human behavior — doesn’t bode well for these kids as they enter adulthood.

Besides, how can kids suffer through algebra and French while daydreaming about perverse uses for carrots? Can him.

Health care a waity matter

Hundreds of Manhattan parents got a glimpse of the future under government-run health care: Not pretty.

A mom desperate to get her two middle-school-age kids the city-provided swine-flu vaccine reports lining up in frigid temperatures for the advertised 9 a.m. start time on Stanton Street last weekend.

But despite what officials consider a lackluster turnout for the shots, 9 a.m. turned to 10 a.m. Then 11 a.m. came and went with no sign of the H1N1 vaccine. The crowd — heavily weighted with well-heeled Manhattanites unaccustomed to Soviet-style queues — devolved into a shouting, agitated mob. Just when the mother feared a riot, the doors parted for the chilled and angry patrons.

One adult in the line summed up the indignity of being forced to depend on the government for anything.

“I hope ObamaCare comes with anger management,” she said.

Ad-Vance research needed

Bernie Madoff must have been busy.

Incoming Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who this summer scheduled, then canceled, a fund-raiser at the home of ex-Love Gov Eliot Spitzer, has on his transition team the disbarred lawyer who helped promote the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, C. Vernon Mason. He lost his law license for gouging poor clients.

I’ve long disagreed with Cy’s fuzzy “root causes” approach to fighting crime. But really — in this lawyer-rich town, can’t the new DA take advice from someone who’s not disgraced, disbarred or disturbed?