Justice & Law Quote by Mario Cuomo

Cuomo sets up a bleak little chain reaction: once you accept that facts can be massaged, you have to admit the rest of the civic machine is just as pliable. The syntax is doing the heavy lifting here. He starts with the seemingly narrow premise of “manipulate news,” then widens the blast radius to judges, lawyers, accountants, and finally reporters again, as if to say the problem isn’t one bad actor but an entire professional class trained to bend systems without technically breaking them.

The repetition of “smart” is the knife. Intelligence, usually a virtue in public life, becomes a solvent. The “smart lawyer” and “smart accountant” aren’t dumb crooks; they’re competent, credentialed operators who exploit complexity as camouflage. Cuomo is indicting a culture where expertise doubles as moral alibi: if you can do it, you can justify it, and if you can justify it, you can sell it as normal.

His last clause - “ruin your reputation- unfairly” - pivots from institutional critique to personal vulnerability. Everyone understands the terror of being defined by a story you can’t control. Coming from a politician who lived inside the pressure cooker of tabloids, investigations, and televised scandal cycles, it reads like both warning and self-defense: don’t romanticize the press as pure watchdog, and don’t pretend the law is a neutral algorithm.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-cynicism-as-profession. Cuomo is arguing that democracy runs on a fragile consensus about limits. When manipulation becomes just another “skill,” accountability starts to look like a sucker’s game.