New York’s prescient mayor

Here is what Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday, as reported by CBS:

Bloomberg later told CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric that the suspect behind the bombing attempt could be a domestic terrorist angry at the government who acted alone.

“If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything,” he said.

The blogger who posted the quote reasonably asks:

[W]hy throw out there the possibility that it was a mentally deranged person or give as an example that it might have been someone who “didn’t like the health care bill or something?” Why throw out there such musings in the first place? And how convenient that the example he chose was a conservative who didn’t like Obama’s agenda.

When Bloomberg was elected mayor in 2001, he was a Republican. Though he was upfront about the fact that he had switched from the Democratic Party just before running purely for opportunistic motives, his pledge to govern like Giuliani put him in the more moderate and rational camp of Democrats. But lately he’s been sounding like your typical New York left-liberal Jew, unembarressedly and inappropriately venting his raw liberal emotions, like the doctor who once entered an examination room where I was reading a Time magazine with Ronald Reagan on the cover (a magazine I had picked up in his waiting room), and cried, “Oh, I hate Reagan!” (And this was the first time I visited this doctor; those were literally the first words I heard him speak.) Forget about whether Bloomberg privately had the thought that the bomber was a conservative angry at the health care bill. For Bloomberg, a man in a responsible position, the mayor of the country’s leading city and the site of the recent terror attempt, to guess out loud on television that the bomber was a conservative, in the absence of any evidence for that, shows a man blindly immersed in liberal prejudices, a man not even sufficiently aware of how his prejudices will sound to others, to edit them when speaking in public. In his obtuseness to the existence of people who don’t share his liberalism, Bloomberg is like New Yorker movie reviewer Pauline Kael who famously remarked after the 1972 presidential election that she couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon had been re-elected, since everyone she knew had voted against him.

And don’t think that Bloomberg will be embarrassed at how his idle and foolish speculation was immediately proved wrong. Being a liberal means never being embarrassed, because stating the liberal credo or the PC line of the moment, no matter how badly it may be discredited the next moment, is itself the sufficient and unchallengeable proof of one’s virtue and goodness.

Allah Pundit wrote about the same story:

Bloomberg: Hey, maybe the Times Square bomber was upset about the health-care bill

Could be. Since we’re pulling theories out of our a**, let me try a few. Maaaaybe … it’s a liberal amnesty shill upset at Nazi America’s tolerance of Arizona’s immigration law? Maaaaybe … it’s a gay-rights supporter irate at the slow pace of progress on “don’t ask, don’t tell”? Maaaaybe … it’s a nutritional fanatic angry that the City hasn’t completely banned salt yet? (Actually, that would make Nanny Bloomberg a prime suspect.) Maaaaybe … it’s the president’s old pal Bill Ayers reliving his glory days? Anything’s possible, so why not have the mayor of the country’s largest city speculate idly on the national news about it?

Allah Pundit has the video of Bloomberg making a fool of himself on the CBS Evening News (I haven’t watched it, but you can bet that as he was venting his moronic liberal biases Katie Couric did not have the same superior and horrified look on her face as she had when she interviewed Sarah Palin), and also further information about possible accessories to the crime living in Connecticut.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 04, 2010 10:23 AM | Send