Michael Bloomberg’s grave mistake

The chaos created by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police department has been covered up the whazoo. You can even read about it on Bloomberg News. To sum up:

• A handful of demonstrators began an “occupy Wall Street” movement.

• Bloomberg sent in the cops. If you’ve seen the videos, you’ve seen that most of the uniformed guys were doing their sheepish best to follow orders without being brutal. The worse most of them (with a few exceptions) could summon up by way of intimidating the protestors were commands to “Get the fuck back.” This was hardly consistent with the Police Department motto here, “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect,” but it wasn’t a grave offense against humanity, either.

• Then some white-shirted command-level people – the ones highest up the food chain, and in frequent contact with their commissioner, who takes orders from the mayor – started to run amok. One, for no reason, walked up to a young female demonstrated, pepper sprayed her in the eyes, then walked away. The internal affairs folks at NYPD are “investigating” the incident. Yeah, sure. Burying it, more likely.

Why hasn't the deputy inspector who did the pepper spraying been suspended pending conclusion of the investigation? Once upon a time, New York cops who were known to perform psycho acts like this were called "rubber guns" because even if they were protected until they could collect their pensions, they were kept on unarmed duty at the precinct house, doing chores like sweeping out the detective squad room.

I haven’t brought up the entire demonstrater-police mess before because I detest Bloomberg enough to follow the advice of Napoleon Bonaparte here: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a grave mistake.”

Bloomberg’s mistake has been to unwittingly fertilize and water a small group of justifiably discontented demonstrators enough to turn them into a national movement. Now the demonstrations have grown exponentially in New York and are popping up in big cities all around the United States.

As for Mayor Bloomberg’s character, you only have to pay attention to a remark he made, not only after the pepper spray incident but also after the police entrapped roughly 700 of the demonstrators by luring them into a traffic lane of the Brooklyn Bridge and then arresting them for being there. Incidentally, these arrests mean that instead of a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge, there’s going to be one in the city courts.

“The police are doing exactly what they’re supposed to,” Bloomberg said.

I rest my case.