Here’s a laugh: In the wake of federal charges Thursday against Sen. Carl Kruger and Assemblyman William Boyland, the Working Families Party is calling for . . . cleaner government.
What next — Moammar Khadafy asking the world to fight dictatorships?
“If these allegations [against Kruger and Boyland] are true, it’s more evidence that our campaign-finance system is utterly broken,” said WFP boss Dan Cantor. So the Big Labor-sponsored group wants taxpayers to foot the bill for all public political races.
What rich irony: Violating campaign-finance rules is precisely what the WFP itself has been repeatedly accused of:
* As The Post first detailed, the group used a for-profit subsidiary called Data & Field Services in an apparent attempt to conceal some of its finances.
* Later, the WFP was sued for having DFS offer cut-rate services to favored candidates as a way to circumvent the rules. (It eventually settled the case.)
* The feds reportedly investigated the group, though last year WFP officials said the probe was ended.
* Last month, Staten Island DA Dan Donovan repeated his call for a special probe of “possible [WFP] violations of the state election law, local campaign-finance law and other related criminality.”
Then again, who knows what kind of “reform” this union front really wants.
After all, in one notable revision of New York City’s campaign-finance rules a few years ago, union groups got the City Council to carve out special exceptions just for (yup) unions. Some reform!
No doubt, any changes the WFP wants now would be meant to allow unions to further dominate New York politics.
True, Cantor’s whine about New York’s “broken” campaign-finance laws does provide some needed comic relief amid all the disturbing news this week of Albany corruption, the Japanese earthquake, Middle East unrest . . .
But New Yorkers would do well not to laugh off this group’s machinations.