Bloomberg's Delusions

In yesterday's state of the city, Mayor Mike exhibited the kind of hubris that has endeared him, well, not to us. Speaking of the city he inherited from Rudy Giuliani (as the NY Times reports) he told his gathered flock: “Keeping New York City and America at the front of the pack begins with an openness to new energy, meaning immigration, and new ideas, meaning innovation,” he said. “That’s how I built my business, and that’s the approach we’ve brought to a city government that was insular and provincial, and married to the conventional.”

Whoa Nellie! This is the classic case of the guy who's born on third base thinking that he's hit a triple-on top of a complete lack of gratitude for the one person who is solely responsible for his improbable election. It appears that Mike's starting to really believe his own BS.

Which gets us to his rhapsody on immigration. As the NY Sun reports, he assailed those politicians who are embracing "xenophobia." We can see all of the batons twirling over at the Drum Major Institute, not to mention all of the huzzahs at the Times from the open borders crowd. Here's the Sun's lede: "Calling on the leading Republican presidential candidates to open their eyes to the contributions of immigrants, Mayor Bloomberg used his State of the City speech to denounce the nativist sentiment that has infected the Republican field and to lay claim to the title of America's mayor."

Fat chance of this. Now we're not going to rehash the nefarious dishonesty of conflating a concern for borders with anti-immigrant sentiment, but we are going to say that Mayor Mike has done absolutely nothing for the immigrants who exemplify the American dream in this city-neighborhood entrepreneurs. Instead, he raises their taxes, over-regulates their stores, let's a flood of non-tax-paying peddlers cannibalize their businesses, and promotes large box stores at their expense. No, Mike only praises immigrants in order to bury them later under his pro big boys economic development policies.

For us, the next two years can't go fast enough. And the thought of his national aspirations actually has us in stitches. This somnambulist couldn't inspire a room of cash-hungry applicant for one of his charitable grants. Kirstin Danis captures this in her commentary on the mayor's speech. At the end, the mayor remarks on how a baby in the audience had slept through his entire speech: "At the end of his 50-minute address, Bloomberg marveled that a newborn baby lying in her mom's arms onstage had slept through the entire speech. "Why should he single out the baby? We were all asleep," one audience member joked."