George Pataki Won't Be Stopped Or Frisked


To the New York media, it's "The Big Apple." To one mob-connected figure, it was "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.  It's up to you, New York, New York..."  To cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg, it was a View of the World from 9th Avenue:

And now for the idea that New York City is all there is to know, or at least the best the world ever has known, we can add  "a veteran police officer" quoted by the New York Post; New York City councilman Peter Vallone; and former New York governor George Pataki.

In the wake of the ruling by federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin  that New York City's stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional, the police officer reportedly stated "Welcome to Chicago,"  Speaking to possibly MSNBC's best and most objective host, City Democratic councilman Peter Vallone bragged "We`re the most diverse, the most -- the best trained, most effective police force in the country. If you want to look at a monitor, let`s put one in Chicago, let`s put one in Detroit. "

Then there was former New York Repub governor George Pataki, who clashed with Eugene Robinson on Tuesday's Morning Joe.  Convinced that New York City is, of course, better than Chicago, Pataki maintained

If [Attorney General Eric] Holder and [President Barack] Obama want to investigate a police department, why don’t they look at Chicago, where the civil rights of young African-Americans are being not only taken away, but they’re being murdered in record rates in the South Side of Chicago? The policing there leaves something to be desired when it comes to protecting the constitutional rights of young African-Americans to walk the streets with life, liberty and in the pursuit of happiness.

Neither the President nor the Attorney General was involved in the lawsuit against Bloomberg's policy but it's easier to slam the likes of Barack Obama and Eric Holder than the less professional, more vicious (Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel.  But Pataki, wise in not directly attacking Emanuel, is a little ignorant about the Constitution. Referring to"the civil rights of young African-Americans (who) are being murdered in record rates in the south side of Chicago," The ex-governor oozes sensitivity when advocating "the constitutional rights of young African-Americans to walk the streets with life, liberty and in the pursuit of happiness."

In fact, one of America's great founding documents does include "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  Except that, of course, this is not the United States Constitution but the Declaration of Independence, which one would have hoped a (former) governor of one of the nation's largest states would be aware of.  

Nor did Pataki explain how "the civil rights of young African-Americans are being... taken away."   There is, frankly, no constitutional right to be happy nor even to pursue happiness, to be free from violent crime, nor even to walk the streets.   The decades-long cliche:  my rights end where your nose begins.

The U.S. Constitution does not routinely regulate relationships between individuals. It does, however, regulate the relationship between the government and the people, and Judge Scheindlin found that the stop and frisk policy as constituted violates the 4th Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, though she did not order the practice be ended.

Pataki claimed also

97% of violent crimes in this city are committed against minorities.  You go where the crime is if you want to stop the crime. We don’t have unlimited resources where we can flood the streets of Midtown Manhattan with police officers...

It’s easy to not pay attention to the housing projects like they do in Chicago, and let crime go on there. It is a tribute to this mayor and Police Department that we are putting so much of our police emphasis in low-income neighborhoods, in high crime neighborhoods, so that the quality of life, the safety that every one of us as an American should be entitled to feel comfortable in, exists not just on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, but exists on 125th Street and Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

I'm overcome by George Pataki's concern about minorities or "young African Americans to walk the streets." But though Pataki himself may count as friends affluent black professionals such as himself, it's unlikely he often has to "walk the streets" with those "young African Americans" he implies he speaks for.   Pataki's residence (photograph below) in Garrison, N.Y., some 56 miles from Manhattan, hardly looks like an urban tenement or even working-class housing and counts Roger Ailes as another of its residents.  It was, as of 2000 (the last year for which I've found figures), over 92% non-hispanic white and less than 3% black.

Please lecture us some more about the mean streets of urban America, Governor.  It's a New York thing, evidently.

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Divine Intervention?

I have to keep up with the conservative blogosphere..... at least better than I have been.

We all know about how John McCain had spoken to Sarah Palin only twice before choosing her as his running mate; for approximately fifteen minutes at a National Governors Association meeting early this year, and at his ranch in Sedona, Az. on the morning of August 29.

You might also have heard about the cruises to Alaska during the summer of 2007 sponsored by the two most eminent conservative magazines, The Weekly Standard and The National Review and how individuals from each cruise dined with Palin at the Governor's Mansion in Juneau. And how they were utterly charmed by the chief executive who impressed them with her charm, self-confidence, and in at least two cases, her physical beauty (described by The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes as "exceptionally pretty and William Kristol as "my heartthrob").

In her recent article in The New Yorker, Jean Mayer describes the role of these meetings, of John McCain's close advisers, and of palinforv.p.blogspot.com, inaugurated in February 2007 by Adam Brickley. Although now an intern at the popular conservative website townhall.com (and prior to that, an intern at the Heritage Foundation), Brickley then was a junior at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado.

What really caught my attention was Mayer's description of Mr. Brickley's religious perspective:

Brickley’s family, once evangelical Christians, now practice what he calls “Messianic Judaism.” They believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but they also observe the Jewish holidays and attend synagogue; as Brickley puts it, “Jesus was Jewish, so to be like Him you need to be Jewish, too.” Brickley said that “the hand of God” played a role in choosing Palin: “The longer I worked on it the less I felt I was driving it. Something else was at work.”

Similarly, close to the end (approximately 8:15 of the 9:25 video) of her 10/20/08 interview by the adoring Dr. James Dobson, the professional psychologist who heads Focus On The Family, vice-presidential nominee Palin states



...because I'm going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God's hands, that the right thing for America will be done, the end of the day on November 4.

Perhaps both Brickley and Palin, thinking alike, were right. Perhaps God did play a role in the selection of Sarah Palin, which then played a role in what happened on November 4. And what happened on that historic day was the right thing for America.

Sarcasm At The New Yorker

Harold W. Ross launched The New Yorker magazine in 1925 with a prospectus which famously declared "THE NEW YORKER will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about."

Less famously, the advisory board for The New Yorker had been culled from a group known to be the "aristocracy of New York sophistication," the Algonquin Round Table, "a group of exclusive writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel for witty conversation and companionship."

Perhaps not surprisingly, fifty-one years later the magazine would run as its cover a map (originating from the nineteen thirties) depicting the world as seen from Manhattan's Ninth Avenue, in which the rest of the world pales in size and significance to New York City. Perhaps readers were supposed to recognize Daniel K. Wallingford's map as satire, a comment on the hubris of New Yorkers. But I think the cleverness was lost on most of us rubes somehow inexplicably surviving beyond The Big Apple.

And into this tradition, at the magazine whose founder said "will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers," has stepped the now-infamous Obamas As Muslim Terrorists cover. Editor David Remnick assures Washington Post media critic Howie Kurtz "It's clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumors and scare tactics about Obama's past and ideology. And if you can't tell it's a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don't know what more to say."

Apparently the public, about whom the editor presumably assumes a "reasonable degree of enlightenment," is sufficiently ignorant or bigoted as to necessitate a sophisticated New York publication to lift it up out of its unawareness. And they are surprised, evidently, that many of us did not pick up on this inside joke, so unable to recognize our lack of sophistication as to appreciate the irony, the sarcasm, generously visited upon us by the enlightened souls at The New Yorker. This applies, I suppose, even to the citizens of Dubuque, residents of the state with the highest literacy rate in the nation.

Now, that is what I call irony.