Who Will Call Out The Mayor?

Mike Bloomberg continues to act on the school governance issue as if we're all idiots-but perhaps he's only responding to the fact that the city's editorial writers are such slavish toadies. The mayor continues to posture that he's the only grown up in the room; and that everyone else is politically craven, while he, and he alone, righteously pursues the public good-unshackled by tawdry politics.

Here's the NY Times report: "At a news conference, Mr. Bloomberg denounced the “reckless behavior” of state lawmakers and called the city’s efforts to maintain continuity “Band-Aids, not solutions.” He said he was “trying to continue on as though mayoral control was approved.”
“Since the Senate refused to exercise its duties responsibly,” he said, “we here in the city are moving to protect our children.”

He reminds us of the pyromaniac who, upon returning to the scene of his fire, clucks on indignantly about the devastation and loss. The destruction is Bloomberg's responsibility; and not one editorial page has the guts to single him out for the deserved opprobrium. Consider today's NY Post editorial: "Bloomberg has long predicted that the expiration of mayoral control would cause the sky to fall. Then he went out of his way to see that it didn't. A week from now, or a month, it still won't have fallen -- and Sampson, et al., likely will have won the mayoral-control struggle by default. So what must Bloomberg do now? "I don't make any government decision based on politics," the mayor said yesterday. Well, his enemies do. They certainly used their power to deal mayoral control a perhaps fatal blow. Now Bloomberg needs to use his to fight back."

This is an aggravated example of editorial aphasia; it is precisely because of Bloomberg's maladroit political maneuverings that we are in facing this mess in Albany. As Wayne Barrett wrote a while back:

"Bloomberg gave $1.2 million to the New York State Independence Party's housekeeping account last year -- a donation that wasn't reported until a 2009 filing by the party. Housekeeping accounts are supposed to pay for staff salaries, voter registration and party building. But Newsday reported that "the bulk" of Bloomberg's unprecedented donation "went to radio and television ads and direct mailings" for Republican and Independence Party candidates in four key senate races, including Padavan's. The mayor also donated $700,000 to the Senate Republicans, another funnel to Padavan's campaign. The next biggest donor to state campaigns last year gave a mere $200,000, making Mayor Mike the largest financier, by far, of the bi-partisan legislative calamity in Albany (though he almost exclusively bankrolled Republicans)."

So if, as the Post and others aver, the state senate is being run by a bunch of clowns, we need these folks to point out that it was Mike Bloomberg who built the Big Top for this circus to take place. The crusaders are, however, mum on this salient fact, content as they are to go after the low hanging fruit; while failing to realize that the evidence of malfeasance and clownishness is simply what the lawyers call, "fruit of the poisonous tree."