Former New York State Senator Tom Libous (“R”-Binghamton) died yesterday in the community he professed to care so much about. Over the past 24 hours there have been many glowing tributes among the political class, “business” leaders, and boot-licking local media outlets.
This will not be one of them.
In “The Barry Bonds of Binghamton” (Nov. 30, 2015) I told you I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again in his obituary: Tom Libous was a blight on the Southern Tier for 30 years and did irreparable harm to the community he professed to care so much about.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Libous’s legal troubles the past few years? Those which made him lose his senate seat and would have landed him in jail had not the man been dying anyway?
His fall from grace is no stain on his legacy: it is a perfect illustration of a career of malfeasance.
Agreed. And as decorum prevents gloating in an obituary, I will stop there.
Simply put, Tom Libous is gone. And I am glad. As one who has made a career of saying the emperor has no clothes, I will say it one final time when no one else seems willing to do so.
In addition to ruining the community in which I grew up, Tom Libous used his influence time and again to harass and intimidate me personally and professionally for a decade. It stopped when I left.
Well, now both of us have left.
Goodbye, Tom Libous.
Goodbye.
Unfortunately, we will not yet be saying goodbye to all the local machine’s second bananas and hangers on left in public policy making positions, so the destruction of our hometown goes on, but this essay briefly sums up the “towering legacy” that made it all possible exceedingly well.
That should be second bananas, suck ups, and hangers on, and what you say about how you were treated well illustrates how talent, merit and ideas have systematically been excluded and/or deliberately driven away by our area’s political leadership for a very long time.