Starstruck, Fact-Challenged NY Times Liberal Outraged at Giuliani's Common-Sense Homeless Critique

Some urban liberals will apparently never forgive Giuliani for cleaning up the city and getting crime under control.Ginia Bellafante's "Big City" column in Sunday's New York Times smacked of a particular brand of star-struck, fact-allergic old-style liberalism in which Bellafante, metro columnist and occasional reporter for the Times, went after an old enemy, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The Dark Ages of Giuliani."

After Giuliani made a common-sense observation about the homeless, Bellafante was so outraged she compared him to....Donald Trump. (The Times even used a photo of Giuliani golfing at Trump Golf Links -- get it? -- last month.)

If the offenses of Donald J. Trump weren’t getting played out by the hour at the volume of a jackhammer in competition with a Nascar event, then recent comments by another New Yorker synonymous with unchecked expressiveness, and also touched by the pixie dust of presidential aspiration, might be generating more outrage. In an interview with NBC’s local news channel in New York, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani explained, with both glee and self-regard, that not long ago he had paid a visit to the 19th Precinct station house on the Upper East Side to complain about a homeless man who had taken up residence on his block.

“Do you know when people lived on the streets and didn’t use bathrooms inside?” he said. “It’s called the Dark Ages.”

Needless to say, Mr. Giuliani did not pause and follow up that remark with, “And how disgraceful that so many centuries later we are still not able to house all of our neediest.” He instead went on to remind us how in the 1990s, his “brain” and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton’s “people” got rid of the homeless, the panhandlers, the nuisances.....

Bellafante blamed Giuliani's past policies for the people on the streets, and the Times' tabloid rivals for stirring up outrage:

Advocates for the homeless responded with fury, pointing out that Mr. Giuliani’s views were “morally appalling” and ignored the way that his own policies had fueled the crisis of homelessness. Of course, his conception of those with no place to live as essentially a gross inconvenience for the rest of us is hardly singular. In recent weeks, an unsettling narrative has unfolded in New York, promoted in large part but by no means exclusively in the tabloid press, demonizing the homeless as a growing presence and a threat to bourgeois life. “Going to the Park? Don’t Trip on a Bum,” read a headline in The New York Post.

Bellafante actually cited a generation-old study of another city as some kind of evidence that derelict crime isn't a legitimate concern.

Over the summer, pictures of people sleeping on the streets have been posted on social media with insinuations that their presence is proof that the city is returning to the mayhem of the 1970s. This would suggest that we knew something definitive about the propensity of homeless people to commit serious crimes. We don’t. Years ago, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University looked at arrest records in Baltimore for 1983 and found that although homeless people were more likely to commit nonviolent offenses like camping without a permit and indecent exposure, they were less likely to commit crimes against people or property....

After giving the left-wing Bill de Blasio mayoralty credit for a statistical blip, a "steady month-to-month decline since December" of people spending the night in shelters, the cop-bashing and Hollywood name-dropping began:

This has not stopped the Sergeants Benevolent Association in New York City from implementing an initiative aimed at getting members and their friends and families to photograph homeless people lying on the street or urinating in public and posting those pictures online. (What could be more benevolent?) The association’s president has said the campaign -- called Peek-a-Boo We See You Too! -- was a response to “the diminishing” of the city’s reputation as a pre-eminently safe place. “It’s outing,” as the actor Richard Gere remarked to me recently.

What has Gere done? Among other things, he has "spent time in shelters" and "committed himself to thinking about his encounters with homeless people." He used to (shudder) actually inquire about their circumstances before realizing he should just throw them money without such heavy judgment: "Now he gives every homeless person he sees some money -- from $1 to $5 -- and moves on."

Because throwing money at people and problems willy-nilly has just done wonders for civil society over the last 50 years.

Previously Bellafante smeared Glenn Beck supporters as racist and bizarrely likened Nazism to "extreme capitalism" in a discussion of the ABC show Lost.

Starstruck, Fact-Challenged NY Times Liberal Outraged at Giuliani's Common-Sense Homeless Critique

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