Christmas Truce

When relatively sensible liberal centrists agree with right wing nuts like me, you have to stop and think...maybe we should realize that like the Christmas truce, some of those guys on the other side of the 'trenches' are just like us.

From DDDB:
Mayor Bloomberg: A Uniter

These times (and resistance to eminent domain abuse and porkish government subsidies) make for strange bedfellows. The progressive Albany Project blog quotes liberally from the Weekly Standard. The Albany Project takes Mayor Bloomberg to task questioning the purported progressive values of the Republican mayor. While the Weekly Standard takes Mayor Bloomberg to task for being too centrist, and wonders why liberals are not more critical of the Mayor.

From the Albany Project's Lipris:

...I also fail to see the "progressive" dimension of steamrolling my Community Board's plan for our neighborhood to allow his developer friends to drive my neighbors from their homes. I've lost the progressive virtues of shutting two firehouses in my neighborhood while throwing public money at a new Yankee stadium. I fail to see the "progressive" nature of the west side stadium or the the eminent domain driven madness of Ratnerville. But, then again, what do I know?
...

I'm going to do something I never thought I'd do, namely quote the Weekly Standard. Why? I'm still not sure. I guess that anyone who reads this site long enough is familiar with my critique of Bloomberg...

Lipris goes on to quote from the Weekly Standard's cover story The Mystery of Michael Bloomberg: Why does a popular but mediocre mayor think he should run for president?:

...It's safe to say Bloomberg will never be confused with Fiorello LaGuardia. When it comes to holding people accountable, Bloomberg seems to have taken lessons from George W. Bush.

At a time when Brooklyn is experiencing a private sector housing boom, the same businessman mayor who tried to give away valuable Manhattan property for a song has supported a half-billion dollars in direct and indirect subsidies for the Atlantic Yards apartment, office, and arena complex in Brooklyn being built by fellow fat cat and subsidy king Bruce Ratner...

... Had Rudy proposed a similar level of subsidy for a project like Atlantic Yards, the liberals would have howled with rage...

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Also from the weekly Standard article:

Bloomberg's reputation is built on the idea that he's not just another politician but an apolitical manager who rises above petty interests. But this image reverses the reality. Bloomberg's failures have been managerial, while he's been a brilliant success politically by catering--via the city treasury and his own fortune--to those petty interests.

[Like Atlantic Yards, there is a complete disconnect between the reality of how Mike is portrayed by his pals at the New York Times, and what he is actually doing.:]

Yet the public doesn't blame Bloomberg. He gets credit for trying to fix the schools, and Klein gets the blame when things go wrong. The pattern is similar with the NYPD. Bloomberg gets credit for keeping crime low, but when cops recently killed an unarmed black man in Queens in a hail of 50 bullets, activists demanded the scalp not of Bloomberg, but of the very successful police commissioner Ray Kelly.

Both cases illustrate how Bloomberg has managed the politics by greasing the usual skids. With the police shooting case, Bloomberg abandoned the cops, three of whom were later indicted and now await trial. Shortly after the shooting, the mayor said, "It sounds to me like excessive force was used" and deemed the incident "inexplicable" even before the details were known.

Like Ratner, Bloomberg has a spin-over-reality PR campaign that clouds his actual actions and allows him to take credit for the good and palm off failures on other people. Only with a suppine and/or lackadaisical (forgive me my high school football coach used to use it) media could this be accomplished.

Short term, its good for Mike, but long term he's unraveling what Giulianni and others fought hard to accomplish. Anway, now the mystrey of why Mike has been shelling out favors to Ratner and others despite them being no benefit for the city is clear - short term it looks good on paper (though long term it is not) and he also is lining up political favors for what promises to be a comical run for president.

As I have perhaps mentioned before I am a registered Republican (a rare enough bird in Brooklyn) I would probably disagree with many anti-yards people on many things (gun control vs the right to bear arms, what exactly the establishment clause means, and probably, most profoundly on many cultural issues outside the scope of law (though increasingly legislated) which is why I nominally still identify as 'right' though I think G W Bush ought to be charged with treason (and no that's not a joke, i mean charged).

But then again, I see protecting the environment as inherently conservative, and our currently foreign policy as anything but- traditionally conservatives have been opposed to the use of force to impose ideology which is explicitly what Bush has said this so called war on Terror (as yet undeclared) is for.

When it comes to local and state issues, what both camps have to realize is that like stealing - there are some things that are just wrong and not idealogical. There is no 'ideology' in pork barrel corruption and giving billions to fat (both literally and figuratively) cats like Ratner. There is no idealogical argument for taking Daniel Goldstein's condo away from him so Ratner can build more expensive ones for other people, or to kick Freddy's out so a TGI Fridays with a Nets Theme can open. The excuses and justifications may be new but Atlantic Yards is classic boss tweed style corruption.