RULE BY RADICALS

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio faces a crisis of his own making with the police department, as a result of his own radicalism. Whatever the merits of the Eric Garner case, he did not respond thoughtfully or responsibly but ideologically, going on about racism, injustice and the police, and making broad, general statements having little to do with the actual case. There was no doubt that his activist heart was with street protesters, but you can’t run a city that way. Instead of rising above the fray, as he today ironically said a leader is supposed to do, he pontificated about the failings of society and yet again brought in his son, this time as a potential victim of the police. Then, having burned all the bridges with the NYPD, when two officers were subsequently murdered  over the weekend, he could only grasp at the one straw still available to him- the families of the victims, as a rationale for standing down. 

Even worse, the radicals who dominate the City Council, in an unprecedented and reprehensible gesture not only encouraged, but participated in demonstrations against their own police department, in solidarity with the Mayor. The odious NY State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, apparently taking a break from corporate shakedowns, in a naked power grab, announced he would investigate NY City police incidents, which brought an immediate rebuke from the DAs of the majority of the boroughs of the city. It is relatively early in the terms of all of these clowns, and they are only getting started. Things will only get worse. 

The basic reason for this is that radicals cannot govern effectively. They view everything through an ideological lens, and can only reckon with things based on how they comport with that vision. They not only lack any ability to approach things pragmatically; they reject pragmatism altogether. They are not liberals, but hard-left radicals. As a result, more and more things are not going to work as they should. A clash with the NYPD was almost inevitable, given their attitude towards law enforcement. Never before in the history of this city have we seen such contempt for the police on the part of public officials. Given their mindset it is no surprise that even when they try to make nice they only make things worse. Thus, after instigating much of the damage himself, the Mayor now wants to talk about “healing” and “coming together” which is what leftists do after they have irreversibly poisoned the well.

I predicted things would go bad last year, here: http://www.georgesarant.com/2013/10/the-ny-city-commune-of-2014.html. There will eventually be a correction because New York is not a radical town; it isn’t even all that liberal. Until then, hopefully the damage won’t be too bad. In the mean time, after what these public officials have done, there is no way the police are going to be mollified until there is a change, at which point my guess is that the public will be more sympathetic to the NYPD than this batch of politicians.