He often seems bored and no one accuses him of having thick skin. He enjoys telling New Yorkers how to live, but the nanny rules never interfere with his personal choices, as when he had a City Hall aide hook up a portable air conditioner in his SUV so it would be cool for him without breaking idling laws.
But Mayor Bloomberg is far more than the sum of his imperial parts, and the twilight of his tenure is revealing his most important accomplishment. He is fighting the good fight so cops can do their jobs and not be handcuffed by the dreamers and wack jobs, including some judges, who apparently think carrying a concealed gun is a civil right.
Even before the reports that a state appellate court had overturned the conviction of a 14-year-old for carrying a loaded gun, and that the teen promptly got another gun and allegedly shot a man, Bloomy has been barnstorming the city to forcefully defend the benefits of stop-and-frisk. A less dramatic version of Churchill’s magnificent stand against both Europe’s appeasers and Hitler, this is Bloomberg’s finest hour in more than 10 years in office.
Ticking off the much higher murder rates of other cities, he asked radio man John Gambling, “Do you really want to go back to that? That’s what we used to be — murder central.”
Saying there must be a “balance between all of our different civil rights,” he added: “One of the basic civil rights is to be able to walk down the street without getting blown away.”
That he even needs to make the argument is an indication of how far off the deep end some critics have gone. Through Thursday, Gotham, with 8.3 million people, had 189 homicides. Philadelphia, with 1.5 million people, had at least 185.
Chicago is the new murder capital, with 2.7 million people and about 250 homicides. The slaughter list goes on. Detroit has almost as many murders as New York with less than 10 percent of our population.
These are astounding facts, and unless you believe that New Yorkers miraculously mutated into a super-peaceful human species, there must be other reasons why the city is so much safer. Any halfway honest conclusion has to give credit to the NYPD.
Stop-and-frisk is not the only tool in the anti-crime kit. But as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says to those who insist there are other ways to get guns off the street, “OK, what are your ideas?”
The silence is deafening because preventing crime isn’t for amateurs. It’s a tough business, and thank God New York has the people willing to do it so the critics are safe to bitch about how they do it.
Part of the problem is that New Yorkers are spoiled by success. Handed a city that was much safer than a decade earlier, Bloomberg took Rudy Giuliani’s incredible gains and built on them. Giuliani’s force cut the murder rate in more than half, and Bloomberg and Kelly have cut it by 34 percent more.
In another context, the NYPD would be up for sainthood.
But the success is not an accident. It’s the result of hard, smart, dangerous work by flesh-and-blood men and women. Eight officers have been shot this year alone, yet still the critics act as though cops are the big problem.
Bloomberg has had enough. Railing against the court decision involving the gun-toting 14-year-old, he ran out of logic and into sarcasm.
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” he said in defending the police. “Just send the kid, give ’em a flower and say go out and kill somebody?”
Careful there, Mayor. You don’t want to give the dopey judges any more bad ideas.
Supreme case of one-way justice
I subscribe to the belief that Chief Justice John Roberts stretched to support ObamaCare partly because he feared the court is viewed as too partisan.
By joining with the four liberals to form a majority, even though they disagreed with his bizarre finding that the individual mandate penalty was a tax, he gave dramatic credence to the idea.
But the notion that conservatives must constantly prove themselves to be reasonable people to their liberal betters is more than a little tiring. The defensiveness, born out of a desire for political and legal comity, is too often perceived as weakness instead of a generous gesture worthy of reciprocity.
The result is not more comity, but new demands that conservatives be, well, more liberal. Whether it involves the Supreme Court, the Senate, the White House or the local school board, a search for compromise generally moves only in one direction.
Sen. John McCain, for example, was every mainstream journalist’s favorite Republican because he often crossed party lines to support Democratic legislation. But the favor was rarely returned, and McCain learned how little respect he really had from the media when he ran for president.
Then he was just another Republican and fair game for their biased attacks.
John Roberts now becomes the latest conservative guinea pig to test the other side’s sincerity. At a legal conference Friday, he declined to discuss ObamaCare but joked he was going to an “impregnable island fortress.”
While he’s there, alone with his thoughts, he might ask himself what his ruling achieved and whether the huge expansion of government’s role in health care and the rising costs for millions of Americans will be worth the candle.
Hill is still in china’s debt
Five years ago, as a New York senator free to speak her mind, Hillary Rodham Clinton complained about an erosion of American sovereignty because foreign governments owned so much of our debt. She told the story of a woman who wanted her to confront China over manufacturing jobs, but that Clinton had responded: “How do you get tough on your banker?”
Apparently, you don’t, then or now.
Despite US sanctions aimed at stopping Iranian nukes, Clinton’s State Department last week exempted China from any penalties for buying oil from the mad mullahs.
Bam’s big cynical deal
Way to stay classy, Mr. President.
After the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, the commander-in-chief took to Twitter to once again spike the football. “Still a BFD” he sent out and included a link to a “Still a BFD” T-shirt sold by his campaign for $30, according to The Weekly Standard.
BFD, of course, refers to vice president Joe Biden’s “big f–king deal” comment when Obama signed the legislation.
Are there no adults in the White House?
Let’s cool it with all the freebies
You don’t have to come and get it. It will come to you.
The Empire State is giving away air conditioners. If you’re in a family earning under $50,000 and can produce a doctor’s note saying you need A/C to prevent “a heat emergency,” somebody will show up at your place with a unit and install it. All you have to do is plug it in.
Next year, given the growing entitlement culture, there will be a new government program to plug it in.