I still ♥ this helluva town

EAST Side, West Side, all around the mayor, New York has opened up. I’m a New Yorker. I love New York. Even if the taxes are as high as an elephant’s eye. Even if the song title becomes “It’s a New York State of Crime.”

Where else can you live? Scratch-Your-Butt, Ark? One room in East Dakota someplace? It has the highest hill and lowest town. No Yankee Stadium, no Lincoln Center, but they got room there. The officials will just move out a buffalo. So everybody, anybody, let nobody knock New York.

Quarantined here for months with no company but peanut butter, I did the only intelligent thing. I checked out New York. And discovered we are No. 1 in most things. We made the top 10 for most-ozone-polluted. Even listed as having had the most indicted legislators. No place has had more. I puffed with pride.

The gold standard began with our 1800s Tammany Hall leader George Washington Plunkitt. He bought land our city needed then sold it to NYC at a profit. He said: “They couldn’t develop the place without my swamp area, and they had to pay for it.” Nice George even published a book on the how-tos of screwing officialdom.

Forgetting Sheldon Silver and the Skelos family. Forgetting even lawyer Michael Cohen, who preferred flounder to freedom, statistics claim 65 percent of state legislators do what’s best for just them, 41 percent get accused, and 29 percent found guilty. Our beloved New York is tops in everything. I bow to Miss Liberty, who will probably eventually be played by Meryl

Streep, who stars in everything.