Don't mind me, I'm just a homophobic meatball from NJ...

While I've lived on and off in Maryland for about the last 6 years, I grew up in NJ and still feel pretty close to it. I'm from a primarily Italian family (with a name like Anthony, who would have guessed?) from a small immigrant town in central NJ.

So it was interesting to read this NY Times Editorial on the McGreevy kerfluffle, especially the part that Jeff Jarvis outlined. You know, this part:

Yet perhaps the most important variable sealing Mr. McGreevey's fate was the setting for his drama. While New Jersey leans Democratic, these are not the Democrats of the Upper West Side or Malibu. These Democrats are still loyal to the "Three I's" of Garden State politics - Ireland, Israel and Italy. These are the union boys, the tradesmen, the enlightened professionals who remember their parents cut stone in Newark and stirred great vats of soup at Campbell's in Camden.

With the Three I's, one can weather corruption charges, as Mr. McGreevey did until this week. In Jersey politics, rolling with the punches of graft has long been a shibboleth of manhood. Being gay, however, is not. It's one thing for a governor to sell a political appointment. It's another for him to have sex with the guy he appointed.


Yup, that's us New Jerseys, or in my case ex- New Jersyans. Just a bunch of ignorant homophobic wops, mics, and joos, not like those fancy New Yorkers or Californians with all their fancy city learnin'. We don't care if you take our money, as long as you aint one of them homersexuals. We're just dumb factory workers and bricklayers.

First of all, McGreevy wasn't forced out, he resigned. He resigned most likely because he used taxpayer money to fund a position for a lover, and made that lover the director of homeland security in a target rich environment - think the Prudential building, Port Newark, and those shitty drivers licences supposedly carried by most of the 9/11 hijackers and every underaged college student from Florida to Maine.

Eric may actually live in NJ, unlike me, but he doesn't seem to like it much - he feels the need to mention it's smokestacks (nevermind the rest of the state) and casts it's residents as dumb ethnics with no tolerance, rather than intelligent citizens who know where to draw the line when it comes to corruption - and that line has nothing to do with sexual preference and everything to do with security and honesty.