This is the depressing state of affairs in New York, in 2010. The various monsters and morons currently running-without-running for statewide office include Andrew Cuomo, Harold Ford, Mort Zuckerman, and, yes, Larry Kudlow.

None of them have announced their actual candidacies. All of them are establishment hacks with mundane ideas pretending to be outsiders. (Though who the fuck knows what any of them actually believe, besides that rich people should not have to pay taxes.) They are the absolute worst New York has to offer, and we say this going into the third term of a blinkered billionaire mayor and the soon-to-be-aborted partial first term of the accidental incompetent blind governor who took over the for the raging vengeful prick who had to quit because he fucked prostitutes with his socks on.

And despite their ridiculousness we must take each of these people semi-seriously entirely because of their friends, who have money and power and influence (and who are all, universally, vapid and stupid people). Ford has the DLC and the Rattners. Mort has Bloomberg. Andrew has, uh, New York's Democratic Party—a particularly useless organization of corrupt wardheelers, rich dingbats, and general incompetents. (Andrew is also the only person on this list guaranteed the job he has not yet deigned to campaign for.)

But Larry "Kuddles" Kudlow just might have the best friends of all. For they are Roger Stone's friends!


GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone has finally openly jumped on the Kudlow-for-Senate bandwagon. The inexplicably still-employed always-wrong economist wants to run against Chuck Schumer.

(Please keep in mind that the "Draft Kudlow" movement is an attempt to invent a drumbeat of popular support for a man who is already running for office, before he acknowledges that he is running for office. Also it is a fundraising campaign.)

Now, Stone correctly notes that Kudlow is a very good dresser. Stone is also right that Chuck Schumer is "perhaps the most odious, pushy, abrasive and self-absorbed jerk in Congress today." (But, you know, very few of those qualities necessarily make someone a bad legislator.) Stone is also right that Kudlow got everything wrong in the run-up to the economic collapse. Then he stops being right.

Some decry Kudlow, saying he was wrong in his economic predictions as our global economic meltdown approached. But who was right? Here is what we do know: taxing and spending got us to where we are today, and higher taxes and more pork spending are making it far worse.

Amazing. I didn't even know we knew that! (This comes after a line about leftists "rewriting history" to make it seem like supply-side economics don't work, just fyi.)

What Stone leaves out (which is funny, because surely a political operative as experienced as Roger knows this) is that Larry Kudlow was also, for more than a decade, a cocaine addict who spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on binges and who went to rehab for his addiction four times. But, to borrow Stone's inspiring defense of Kudlow's awe-inspiring constant wrongness, who hasn't been fired from The National Review for being a crackhead?

Congrats, Larry Kudlow, for making Harold Ford look electable.

[Top photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images]