"Snake Plisskin, please pick up at the white courtesy phone!"
Posted on 11/06/2013 11:34:01 AM PST by Kaslin
The new mayor of New York City is a Red Sox fan. According to the rules of the New York I grew up in, I'd expect to see the Hudson turn into a river of blood and Zabar's to close due to a locust infestation before that happened.
But if De Blasio's remarkable rise proves anything, it's that the rules can change. A liberal's crazy liberal, De Blasio still waxes nostalgic about the noble struggle of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, for whom he raised money in the 1980s. He violated the ban on travel to Cuba for his honeymoon with his formerly gay wife, and he often talks as if he's handing out literature in Union Square for the former left-wing New Party, for which he used to work.
For conservative pundits, he's the Austin Powers of pre-Rudolph Giuliani urban liberalism, a near perfect throwback thawed out for our amusement. Social justice is his bag, baby.
But for those of us born and raised in pre-Giuliani New York, he can also conjure images of Charles Bronson in "Death Wish," the gritty vigilante flick that symbolized the city in that era.
Vincent Cannato, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, wrote the definitive book on John Lindsay, the mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973. Cannato's book "The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York," tells the story of liberalism's now-forgotten golden boy. Charming, improbably handsome, resolutely liberal and Republican (until he switched parties), Lindsay had the dubious distinction of overseeing much of New York's horrific decline into legal, fiscal, racial and moral chaos.
Lindsay's defenders are legion in New York. In their minds, everything was going great and then, suddenly, when Lindsay left office, the place went off a cliff overnight. Cannato says that whenever he appears at an event to discuss his book, the Lindsayites swarm to defend their hero. One of their primary talking points is the fact that Lindsay fulfilled his vow to "throw open the city to producers from Hollywood," ushering in a renaissance in New York filmmaking.
And it's true. But just look at the movies born of Lindsay's efforts: "Taxi Driver," "The French Connection," "The Prisoner of Second Avenue," "Panic in Needle Park" and other films depicting a rotting Big Apple -- a "voluptuous enemy" with "the stench of Hell," to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael's review of "Taxi Driver."
Hollywood may have exaggerated the extent of New York's Stygian gloom, but you can only exaggerate the truth. And anyone who lived in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s can recognize that while "Death Wish" may have been a caricature, like any good caricature it captured the likeness better than the subject would have liked. When I was a kid, street crime was a given, rationalized by many liberals as the price one had to pay to live in such a wonderful metropolis.
De Blasio comes from a wing of liberalism that looks nostalgically on the days when New Yorkers were immeasurably worse off but urban liberals had more confidence. He has promised to get rid of the "stop-and-frisk" policies that helped make New York City the safest large city in the world. (There was an average of more than six murders a day in 1990. This year, the city is on target to average less than one.)
He talks as if all of New York's problems stem from the fact the rich find it too hospitable. This despite the fact that city spending went up nearly 50 percent on Michael Bloomberg's watch alone, fueled by ever-higher tax burdens on the city's wealthy (the top 1 percent account for 43 percent of city revenues).
Maybe a De Blasio mayoralty will be constrained by the successes of the last 20 years and the expectations of New Yorkers. But there's an irony here. A city with a better memory would still surely be liberal, but it would not be defrosting someone like De Blasio. He would be impossible without the successes of the Giuliani administration (and Bloomberg's willingness to sustain them), just as Giuliani would have been impossible without the accumulated failures of his predecessors.
De Blasio's success proves the one eternal rule of the game in politics: Victory is never permanent, nor is failure.
NYC will not be just ungovernable, it will be unlivable.......................
ON THE ROAD TO SERFDOM - 73% OF NEWYORKERS PUT THEIR DESTINY IN THE HANDS OF A COMMUNIST
“Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.” - John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, 1777
“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.” AYN RAND
Obama/de Blasio’s fait accompli – Under de Blasio New York will suffer a worse devastation than 9/11.
Bloomberg was a demonrat before he ran as a republican in 2001, and the reason why he changed his party affiliation was that he had no chance to win as a rat.
Maybe she’s still gay, and its like the Clinton marriage.
Maybe he’s a bit ambi-sextrous, too.
I just checked the Census Bureau website.
Only 33% of New York City residents are non-Hispanic whites.
I’ll guess that number is about to go down.
NYC can’t fall apart until after May of next year.
I have tickets to see Kristin Chenoweth in concert at Carnegie Hall (front section, center!) then.
Well, he is the first Democrat to be elected Mayor in 20 years.
These STUPID SCHMUCKS deserve whateverthehell this commie does to them. For starters, I hope he jacks their taxes through the freaking roof just before he invites the criminals back to town and...
Oh wait. They’ll all be living down at City Hall.
never mind
Highest cost of living cities by rank..
1. NY (Manhattan) 2. NY (Brooklyn) 5. NY (Queens) from the Huff Post/Business.
Don’t want to hear about any poor and underprivileged in NYC.. Scrooge ‘em they chose to live and vote there so let them reap the impoverished results with a smile. Tote the vote.
We’ve begun raising our second generation since the end of the Cold War. That’s two generations of people who have no clue what Communism is or why they should fear it.
Hence the polling of Millennials indicating that they are totally agnostic on their preference in economic systems.
They haven’t been taught or exposed to our Constitutional Principles or the writings of our founders. Leftists have purposely uneducated them so they are easily manipulated by lies and deceit.
Not really. Bloomberg was definitely Democratic in heart still, having been a member of that party up until 2001 and switching to the GOP to ride Giuliani’s coattails.
You new Yorkers voted for him.... Live with the consequences..
Don’t come crying when your world turns to one of the pits of hell.
You new Yorkers voted for him.... Live with the consequences..
Don’t come crying when your world turns to one of the pits of hell.
Oh I forgot... Don’t come to Texas.... We don’t want your sickness.
The city has an income tax, maybe he could pull a Hollande and jack it to 75%
Lindsay was incredibly naïve and incredibly infatuated with himself. I remember when he walked into the Harlem riots, which was a nice gesture, but unfortunately then he spent his entire time after that trying to suck up to people who were ruining the city. And I don’t mean the black hoods on the streets, but the “radical elite,” such as Leonard Bernstein, who went way outside of his musical competence with his stupid political dinner parties (one of which include Black Panthers).
The horrible De Blasio is a flat-out Marxist. I can’t even begin to imagine what made people vote for him, except possibly that they were tired of Bloomberg’s rich man’s obsessions: his weight and his health, which he imposed on all New Yorkers. De Blasio will maintain all of these things, and then will go on to drive out every productive person who lives in the town and turn it back into the hell-hole that made me leave it in the 1970s.
I came back for awhile, moved away again for other reasons, and was considering going back at least on a part-time basis. But now? No way. No way at all.
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