Lord Bloomberg's Manor

Last Saturday, just before noon, I was reminded once again how Michael Bloomberg is making a hash out of New York City. It's a bit circuitous, so please be patient. Junior and I were in Times Square, first stopping at the excellent Virgin Megastore for the new Foo Fighters CD, and then on to Toys R Us to pick up several Tech Deck Dudes for MUGGER III. We wandered into the videogame section, where my 10-year-old selected a new Tony Hawk PlayStation release, and asked a clerk when Grand Theft Auto 4 would be available.

Following the store's policy, the fellow inquired whether I was aware that the controversial game contained computerized blood, gore and violence. Yes indeed, I replied, as if kids in New York (and most of America) haven't seen enough real-life violence in the last year. The young man?no racial profiling necessary here?snorted and said, "Well, I guess you don't mind if your son grows up with a criminally deranged mind?" I refrained from asking how his most recent stay at Rikers was, and instead simply told the guy he was a real asshole. He countered with an updated (if incoherent) version of so's-your-mother, and then immediately vamoosed.

So where does Mayor Mike figure into this anecdote? As I wrote last week, Bloomberg could solve a lot of the city's financial problems by immediately legalizing gambling in the five boroughs, with casinos, slot machines, new hotels, the whole Las Vegas routine. Why this revenue bonanza hasn't been instituted by now is a mystery: I suppose the Mark Green-like goo-goos are afraid that the introduction of gambling would turn New York into Pottersville.

Yipes! Let's not kid ourselves. In a densely populated city that houses the most ethnically diverse mix in the country, where vagrants feel no compunction about pissing in the streets, uptown bluebloods waste time in private clubs reminiscing about an earlier era when Jews, not to mention blacks, were kept in their place, and mobsters are still romanticized by tabloid columnists, no one would mistake our collective home for a small Wisconsin town.

A reasonable person can have no patience for Bloomberg's reversion to a tax-happy Kennedy liberal. His planned financial burden will be spread throughout the population, angering almost everyone, whether it's the subway fare hike, tolls on East River bridges, higher property taxes, commuter taxes, surcharges on high-income residents, punitive cigarette taxes that harm small businesses and God knows what else he has up his bespoke sleeve.

The New York Times must be delighted with Bloomberg's reprisal of David Dinkins' one term as mayor. I suppose as long as Mike doesn't mess with the newspaper's plans for a new headquarters in midtown, which is displacing retail tenants, the editorial board will give him a thumbs-up on every antigrowth idea he comes up with.

Bill Keller, for example, endorsed Bloomberg's obsession with cigarette taxes in an Oct. 19 column. He wrote: "[Bloomberg] is no libertarian, let alone libertine, but his attitude toward private pleasure is pretty much live and let live.

"On the subject of tobacco, though, he has surprised many constituents with his zeal. First he slapped on a city tax increase that raises the price of a pack of cigarettes to around $7...

"I think the mayor is on the right side of something important." Remember how the media, obviously including the Times, gleefully ridiculed former President Bush for his unfamiliarity with supermarket scanners? Keller's no different: if he could locate a bodega that sells a pack of smokes for "around $7," the place would be instantly mobbed.

More realistic was the following Oct. 26 letter to the editor in the New York Post. Jim Lesczynksi vents: "How dumb does Mayor Bloomberg think his subjects are? To claim that smoking must be down because legal cigarette sales are down insults our intelligence. I suppose we must have eliminated marijuana use altogether, because the pharmacies are reporting zero pot sales. All Bloomberg has done with his extreme cigarette taxes is create another black market."

Another Democrat in The Gutter

Not content with traditional race-baiting, a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, South Carolina's Alex Sanders, upped the ante in a debate with GOP challenger Lindsey Graham last week. Sanders, who was lovingly profiled by The New Yorker's Joe Klein earlier this year as a down-home fella, a real card, took issue with Rudy Giuliani's television advertisements endorsing Rep. Graham. According to The State, South Carolina's largest paper (which endorsed the Democrat on Oct. 27), Sanders said: "[Giuliani's] an ultra-liberal. His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don't think so."

How charming.

I carry no water for New York's mayor-in-exile. While the 9/11 massacre obviously softened America's most popular Republican, he's genetically an egotistical prick who'll step on innocent people to grab headlines. But that he shared an apartment with two gay men is irrelevant, certainly in South Carolina. Giuliani just doesn't care about a person's sexuality, and that perfectly normal view hardly makes him a bleeding-heart liberal. Sanders, who's trailing in the race (losing by 17 points in a mid-October Mason-Dixon poll, and 12 in an earlier Zogby poll), is probably getting desperate. His antigay slur was probably a none-too-subtle reminder to voters that Graham is a bachelor.

Klein's May 13 profile of Sanders presented a far different candidate, certainly not one who'd resort to Carville smears. He wrote: "Sanders is sixty-three, but his sensibility seems much older?from the time before radio, when people entertained each other by telling yarns... He has a weathered, scratchy voice and a thick, juicy Carolina accent... Sanders's success or failure hardly seems the point?and Graham is almost an afterthought. The real contest here is between an American archetype, the cracker-barrel fabulist, and the consultant-driven sterility of the current political system."

Typically, Klein fell for the accent and "yarns," while stupidly dismissing Graham as a blow-dried live-by-the-polls pol. Never mind that Sanders is such a "cracker-barrel fabulist" that he traveled to Las Vegas for a fundraiser hosted by Tom Daschle. In reality, Graham is one of the few members of Congress who appears to possess a conscience. Not only did he perform a valuable, if futile, service to the country as one of the House managers in Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings, but he also risked his electoral future by endorsing longshot John McCain over George W. Bush in the contentious 2000 South Carolina primary. As Americans understandably mourn the death of Paul Wellstone, it's worth remembering that the late Minnesota Senator, a legitimate maverick, wasn't the only congressman who wasn't enveloped by hypocrisy. Lindsey Graham falls into that rare category, as do Sens. Russell Feingold and Phil Gramm.

My favorite suck-up to Sanders in the Klein profile read: "It is said that some politicians?Al Gore, for example?speak in perfect paragraphs; Alex Sanders seems to speak in novellas. 'Half the stories in my books, I stole from Alex,' the novelist Pat Conroy told me a few days after my plane ride with Sanders... 'You could take that plane ride five more?no, twenty more?times and he wouldn't run out of stories. I keep waiting for it with dread: the night that he just runs out. He hasn't yet. It's like hanging out with Mark Twain.'"

Judging by Sanders' last-minute campaigning, it seems more like "hanging out" with Dr. Laura.

Don't Disrespect the Monkey

The boorish behavior of Jeff Kent and Barry Bonds notwithstanding, the lowlight of this year's splendid World Series was undoubtedly MasterCard's fourth-game unveiling of baseball's 10 Most Memorable Moments. As I've written before, the game is a diversion. Who needs a reminder that today's fans, who voted for the Moments, have the collective attention span of a mouse?

Yes, Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive-game record was an amazing achievement, and certainly deserves to clock in at, say, Number 14. Personally, I'd choose Gehrig's heartbreaking farewell speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939 as the singular moment in baseball history. But also in the top 5 would be Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947, which forever changed the sport. And Curt Flood's refusal to be traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies, which ultimately resulted in free agency, even after Flood lost his case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Also, Babe Ruth being traded to the Yanks and introducing the homer to the sport, as well as steroid-free Hank Aaron breaking Ruth's home run record, which came in at Number 2.

I can't stand Pete Rose, but did cheer when he received the biggest ovation at Pac Bell Park that night (his besting of Ty Cobb's record for hits made the Top 10), an effective flip of the bird to baseball's blind establishment that still won't honor him at Cooperstown. Also fascinating was seeing Mark McGwire, who retired last year, back to normal size: I wonder how many pounds Bonds' head will lose once he calls it a career.

As for Anaheim's inspiring victory, naturally I look at it through the eyes of a Red Sox fan. It's all about us. Boston's management ought to make the Angels' postseason games mandatory viewing for all its players, hoping they might get the message that even those not the fleetest of foot can be more aggressive on the basepaths. If Tim Salmon can routinely go from first to third on a single, so can Manny Ramirez. I'm not one for ballpark gimmicks, but the rally monkey and ThunderStix delivered, creating an explosion of sound and enthusiasm that absolutely contributed to the team's defeat of the sour Giants.

The New York Sun's Wallace Matthews wrote a fairly offensive column about the Series on Oct. 28, denigrating the Angels' achievement. He said about the final game: "Before the first pitch was thrown, there was a definite good guy/bad guy aspect to this World Series... The Angels...were the Team From Disneyland [and on the market, even as Michael Eisner hugged Gene Autry's widow on the podium], playing in the shadow of Cinderella's castle and owned by the Saccharine Empire itself. They even had one of the Seven Dwarfs, 5-foot-6 David Eckstein, batting leadoff. Their cloyingly wholesome fans tried to ignite the offense by cradling stuffed monstrosities dubbed 'Rally Monkeys' and slapping together these silly inflatable gizmos they called Thundersticks."

David Eckstein, who'd be a catalyst for any Major League team, is not a dwarf, Wally. And if the monkey is hokey, it's no more annoying than the constant replays of Derek Jeter's and David Wells' past heroics that clog Yankee Stadium's electric scoreboard between innings.

Mixed Reporting

As the confrontation between the spineless United Nations and the Bush administration heads to a conclusion, probably this week, it was informative to read the coverage in the major dailies on Oct. 27.

Not surprisingly, The New York Times provided the comic relief. Elaine Sciolino's lead sentence is a corker: "In a bold diplomatic challenge to the United States, France announced today that it might formally introduce its own resolution on disarming Iraq at the United Nations Security Council." So French. Yes, it's "bold" that the gutsy country, which put up such a valiant fight against Hitler in 1940, "might" introduce its own resolution to the UN.

The Times' Triple-A newspaper, The Boston Globe, was more forthright about the standoff. Elizabeth Neuffer wrote: "President Bush warned the UN Security Council yesterday that the United States will rally a military coalition against Iraq if the world body does not pass a tough new US resolution aimed at forcing Saddam Hussein to disarm. 'If the United Nations does not pass a resolution which holds him to account and that has consequences,' Bush said after arriving for a meeting of Pacific Rim nations in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, 'we will lead the coalition to disarm him.'"

And that's the essence of the story, which Neuffer correctly summed up in her first two sentences, leading one to believe that the weekend copy desk at the Globe is more lenient (or disinterested) than its lapdog counterparts during the week.

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung and Mike Allen were not shy about displaying their own bias in reporting the same story as Neuffer did. The duo said: "U.S. efforts to lead multilateral coalitions against Iraq and North Korea flagged today, as administration officials seemed increasingly resigned to the possibility of abandoning U.N. negotiations over Iraq, and Asian leaders meeting here with President Bush declined an offer to take a harsh stand against Pyongyang."

Much to DeYoung and Allen's dismay, President Bush is not Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. The phrasing "increasingly resigned" ignores all that Bush and his administration (yes, including Colin Powell) have repeated over and over for the past six weeks: If the UN doesn't have the will to take on Saddam, it'll become irrelevant and the United States will proceed without its blessing.

Hands Off Taki

David Corn tees off on Pat Buchanan's The American Conservative in the current Nation, and while it's hard to disagree with his statement that the Buke is a "self-appointed heir to the isolationist America First movement of the 1930s," it's a somewhat objectionable article.

Corn describes Buchanan's feud with the "neocons," who provide a punching bag for anyone to the left of James Baker?he even calls The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol the "Michael Corleone of the [neocon] clan"?and correctly concludes that TAC isn't likely to attract much of a readership. Nevertheless, it's also a vehicle to trash the traditional bogeymen of the extreme left wing.

Consider this slur on The Wall Street Journal: Corn explains that Buchanan is against immigration, unlike the Journal's editors who "welcome the cheap labor." Corn must've been listening to some old Phil Ochs songs to peddle that propaganda. An expansive view toward immigration is hardly centered around "cheap labor"; rather, it's the realization that the United States is a country built upon people from other nations who moved here to improve their lives. Maybe the concept of the "American Dream" isn't taught in most schools today, but Corn is old enough to understand the United States' foundation. And it would seem obvious even to a union man like Corn that if immigration is severely limited, or put under a moratorium, the entire country will suffer.

Then there's the obligatory swipe at Taki, the prolific and wealthy journalist who's bankrolling Buchanan's new hobby. Describing Taki, a former New York Press columnist (as was Corn), as "the jet-setting son of a shipping tycoon and convicted drug felon" is the kind of dirty pool that Nation writers regularly indulge in. It's true that Taki served a stretch of time in England for possession of cocaine in the early 80s, but it's not as if he were a dealer or drug mogul, which is the clear implication of Corn's snide dig.

Now that The Nation has lost the services of Christopher Hitchens, one of its few entertaining and often insightful writers, the publication is almost completely devoid of any humor whatsoever, except when Alexander Cockburn gets away with a jab at Eric Alterman or Katha Pollitt. Should TAC go belly up, the earnest weekly might consider hiring Taki, if only to spice up a very dull and dark magazine.

Not that I'm a fan of TAC, especially since Taki's column is sanitized to conform to Buchanan's uptight politics and isn't nearly as valuable as his contributions to London's Spectator. But with Taki's greenbacks, Buchanan is free to espouse his disgusting anti-Semitism without having to worry about someone censoring him.

In the Nov. 4 issue, he writes: "On September 11 came blowback. Now, to make America safe from a terrorism provoked by our own mindless interventions, we have decided to 'liberate' Iraq, with Ariel Sharon as our role model. Ought we not first ask ourselves how Sharon's invasion of Lebanon turned out, and how his occupation of the West Bank has made his own country more secure?

"Or should we wait until Washington is as exciting as Jerusalem?

"Congress has now capitulated and surrendered its power to make war to Mr. Bush. So we are likely going to war. But when the cheering stops and U.S. soldiers shot in the back in occupied Baghdad are brought home to Dover AFB, hopefully, we will settle accounts with those who sacrificed God's Country on their pagan altar of empire."

Swell. So, once Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, President Bush and William Safire are safely dispatched to a gulag guarded by TAC/Nation thugs, I guess Buchanan will join forces with Paul Begala and run for president again. What a wonderful world this will be.

OCTOBER 28

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