THE STADIUM HUSTLE

1) The West Side Stadium, Super Bowl 2010 and NYC 2012 are all miserable ideas.

2) The MTA is an absolute mess on every conceivable level.

Those two themes came together in the most unimaginative way last Thursday with the announcement that the MTA board, well-stocked with Bloomberg and Pataki cronies, has decided, with nary a single dissent, to hand over West Side railyards to the Jets.

There are still a few lawsuits standing in the way of breaking ground at the site, but the stadium project suddenly has momentum again, after several months of roadblocks, zigs and zags. The mayor, for one, couldn't wait to start talking smack again.

When Madison Square Garden, Cablevision and Al D'Amato began putting their lawsuit together immediately after the decision was made, Bloomberg, in his inimitably snotty, condescending fashion, told them to "give it up." (We imagine him practicing this line at home in the mirror, Taxi Driver–style, wearing nothing but his Fruit of the Loom and that cowboy hat he wore at the Country Music Awards press conference.)

Another rat to come out to play was Chuck Schumer. At a fundraising breakfast last Saturday, the senator told a group of 20 local real estate developers that he was kind of, sort of, not fully in support of the West Side Stadium plan, and thought the space could be put to much better use. But ever since the plan was first made public, Schumer's been dodging questions about it like a rookie White House press secretary. Only now, after the MTA vote and once he's had time to study the fallout polls, has he said anything at all, proving once again what a complete weasel he is.

As for the creature that made the stadium an issue in the first place, Daniel Doctoroff actually insisted this past weekend that he didn't want the IOC to give New York any "pity votes" on account of the 2001 attacks.

Come again, Danny? His entire proposal, littered as it is with hundreds of 9/11 references, is nothing but a massive plea for pity votes. It remains one of the most sickening aspects of the whole charade.

These are just three simple, telling snapshots of the kind of people who are in the process of shoving this project down the city's throat. And we get the impression that we haven't seen anything yet.

Still, there remains a singular bright spot in this whole sordid mess. After the MTA announced its decision last week, a new poll revealed that nearly a quarter of New Yorkers said that they would now vote against Bloomberg solely on the basis of how he's handled the stadium "debate." Not that they don't have a thousand other reasons to vote against him, but we'll take what we can get.