Why do NYers love this guy so much?

From Bloomberg Watch:

“Michael Bloomberg is the most corrupt politician New York has seen in our generation.”

Isn’t it about time that someone said that? Well, I just did.

Hyperbole?

In the past eight years Bloomberg has paid millions of dollars to the Republican Party and ended up with its ballot line three times. He did the same with the Independence Party, which also received sole source contracts from the Bloomberg administration. As far as I know, these contracts have never been questioned, let alone investigated. Is nobody interested? Taxpayer money aside, Bloomberg simply says:

It’s my money and I can spend it any way I want. And it’s all legal. And you’re a disgrace to even question it. I stand for progress, not politics.

Giving public officials cash in exchange for favorable government action is of course a crime. Granted, the real estate lobby, the hedge fund operators, the predatory equity crowd, and to be bipartisan about it, the trial lawyers do it all the time. If the exchange or the promise is explicit and can be proved, people go to jail. But the quid quo pro is rarely contemporaneous. Instead, the players carry around ledgers in their heads, political due bills. But it’s corrupt and everyone knows it. It’s just that the beneficiaries have made so much of it legal.

Is the Bloomberg Way really so different?