Peacemaker?

Now we don't really believe that Liz B is being ironic when she titled her Bloomberg post; "Bloomberg the Peacemaker." But the title got us to thinking about the old George Clooney movie, The Peacemaker, which had about as much violence and terrorism as any one flic could possibly have. In our view the Clooney movie had the decency to be fully aware of its less than noble appeal to our basest instinct-an honest approach, however, eludes Iron Mike.

Bloomberg's battle plan is pure stealth. Unlike the more openly bellicose Giuliani, Bloomberg acts like a choir boy while in reality allowing his minions to play the kind of hard ball that the swells in this town excoriated our former mayor for. And make no mistake, Bloomberg's resources make his muscle-flexing exponentially more threatening to a democratic polity than the geshreis of Rudy.

It's totally the mailed fist in the velvet glove approach; and we're kinda wondering when the NY Times publisher/editorial board will get around to recognizing the danger. Perhaps their reticence here devolves from the paper's fiscal difficulties-being so close to Broadway encourages the hope, no doubt, that an angel like Mike could eventually come to their rescue. In any case, what it underscores is just how much the money plays a role in all of this-and at every level of the discussion.

We did get a kick out of the mayor's comments on direct democracy: "Oddly, Bloomberg took a bit of a shot at referenda-happy California, where he was just campaigning for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's nonpartisan redistricting proposal, Prop. 11, that's on the ballot this fall, saying that you can't run a government "by taking referendums on everything you see" and citing California as a place where referenda has led to having "two laws that can't exist at the same time."

If this keeps up, we're gonna have to send in Joe Biden as the mayor's spokesman-since clarity and consistency is so obviously not a job requirement. In any event, we should all be wary of the mayor's professed magnanimity; it's as genuine as his word.