It sounds like it all started out rather innocently enough but evidently a fella by the name of Mike Fayette broke some rather important rules that I can only assume he didn't know even existed. That's always the danger one runs whenever dealing with liberals. You see, Mr. Fayette is, or was, an engineer at the New York State Transportation Department, and his little sleigh ride to Hell began with what, he must have thought at the time, was a harmless interview that he gave to a reporter from
The Adirondack Daily Enterprise. In this interview, Mr. Fayette actually praised Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the transportation workers who had labored to repair roads and bridges washed out by Tropical Storm Irene back in 2011. No matter that he was offering praise, his supervisors said he had not been authorized to speak to the press, and before Mr. Fayette knew what hit him, they moved to fire him, but he chose to retire instead and left in February. And this story might have died right there, but for the rather bizarre reaction from the Cuomo administration to an article about the strange scenario that appeared on Wednesday of this week in The Daily Enterprise.
On Thursday, absolutely livid that some engineer from the Adirondacks was now being portrayed as yet another victim of Cuomo’s rather well known penchant for control, a top aide to the governor, some boob by the name of Howard B. Glaser, took to the airwaves to defend the honor of his boss. He did so by actually reading aloud Mr. Fayette’s disciplinary history, on the radio, describing him as a troubled employee who had previously been penalized for having an improper relationship with a subordinate, misusing his work e-mail to send sexually explicit messages and using his state-assigned vehicle for personal errands. "It is not the policy of this administration to terminate people solely for improper contact with the press," said Mr. Glaser, adding, "If that were the issue here, the only issue, there would not have been a termination." So, what, I guess we're to believe it was just all some strange coincidence? Needless to say, Mr. Fayette, who had worked for the state for 29 years, was stunned. Are we really expected to believe that after 29 years it was decided at this particular moment in time to fire this "troubled employee?" Sorry, I'm not buying it!
"It’s absolutely outrageous," Fayette said on Thursday. "The governor needs to say, ‘Hey, look, guys, you’re embarrassing me, you’re embarrassing the state, you’re going after this guy like he’s freaking killed somebody.’ " Mr. Fayette said he believed Mr. Glaser broke the law by disclosing his record. "If anything, someone should be investigating that clown," Mr. Fayette said. "You can’t do that. That is so over the line it’s not funny." He added, "He’s just daring me to hire an attorney and sue him." Glaser, acting all indignant and such, countered Fayette's threat to sue, by saying that all of the information he disclosed on WGDJ-AM, in Albany, had come from a document that was a public record. "Some in the press were breathless to fit this incident into a favored narrative about the Cuomo administration control of information," Mr. Glaser wrote in an e-mail. "But the facts turn out to be inconvenient to that tired story line. If reporters had taken the time to get the whole story, a much different picture would have emerged of a quirky but basically routine personnel matter." Well, he sure told them!
This rather idiotic case began back in August, when a reporter at the newspaper, writing a series of articles on the first anniversary of Tropical Storm Irene, asked to speak to Transportation Department workers. And when a spokeswoman for the department chose not to respond, according to the newspaper, the reporter contacted Mr. Fayette, who was the agency’s resident engineer in Essex County. Mr. Fayette, 55, had grown up on a farm near the Canadian border and had worked for the department since college graduation. He agreed to an interview, saying he feared the newspaper would otherwise accuse the department of "blowing off" its request. The resulting article, which was published on Aug. 30 with the headline "
D.O.T. Engineer on Irene: ‘We Were Up for It,’ " suggested that the department had worked valiantly after the storm. Six days later, Mr. Fayette received a letter ordering him to attend a "disciplinary interrogation" in Albany, which he said he later found out was a result of the interview he had granted. He was soon told that the state would seek to fire him but he later decided to simply retire instead.
Cuomo administration officials said no one in the governor’s office had known about Mr. Fayette’s case until it was reported in the paper. Right, and if you believe that I've got some ocean front property in Arizona I can sell you dirt cheap. As for the Transportation Department, whose silence in response to an inquiry from a reporter set off this rather idiotic chain of events? Its communications office did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday. This is the way liberal psychotics like Cuomo operate. Through no fault of his own this guy Fayette was simply made an example of so that others will think twice about speaking before being "authorized" to do so. And it's hard to question his motives, he saw agreeing to the interview as way to avoid any perception that his department was trying to dodge the press. And what does he get for his efforts? He gets to be unemployed. Ah well, like they say, no good deed goes unpunished. The bottom line here is that Cuomo's a dick and those who work for him are dicks. He's got New York as screwed up as Barry as has the rest of the country. Therefore, I guess, he thinks of himself as deserving to be president.
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