“Think about this judge on stop-and-frisk…What does she know about policing? Absolutely zero.”
According to the Daily News, that’s what Mike Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show about Judge Shira Scheindlin’s decision on the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy.
What does Michael Bloomberg know about the Constitution? Absolutely zero. Because it was not Judge Scheindlin’s job to “know about policing,” or to judge this policy’s effectiveness (which, according to all the stats I’ve read, isn’t). It was her job to apply constitutional standards to the policy and make a decision based on those constitutional standards. And she did.
Moreover, Bloomberg’s sneering criticism of a federal judge is unseemly. It would be improper for Judge Scheindlin to respond in kind on, say, NPR. Bloomberg is flinging verbal knives at someone who is restrained from fighting back.
That makes him a bully.
I wonder how Michael Bloomberg, a Jew, knows so little about not very ancient history that he can’t see how stopping hundreds of thousands of people based solely on their color and/or their ethnicity would conjure up scary pictures of Europe in the 1930’s or, indeed, this country after Pearl Harbor.
What is he saying in defense of this policy? We shouldn’t worry about it because we’re no longer wearing Jewish stars on our sleeves? Because we’re not obviously Asian? Because we’re not women in Afghanistan? Or Israel? Or Kansas?
What he can’t say — although he does — is, hey it’s OK because it works. It doesn’t work.
So what is he saying? “There, there,” he’s patting our little heads, “us guys are taking care of everything. What you’re worrying about is not happening here. ” Why not, Mike? Because you say so? Because Ray Kelly says so? You tell me I’m not seeing what I’m seeing. So what am I seeing, Mike and Ray? Hallucinations?
Bloomberg and Kelly, two men whose own ethnicities would have caused them serious problems not so many years ago, seem to be claiming that they’re gentlemen and that’s why they shouldn’t be thought of as fascists.
Well, sorry, guys. It was happening. It was happening and most of us could see that it was happening. You’re bullies — and that bullying has a tinge of misogyny when you attack a federal judge who happens to be a woman — and you’ve got one foot at least planted in the ideology called fascism.