NYT: De Blasio Inauguration Speakers Were 'Graceless and Smug'

January 3rd, 2014 11:15 AM

One would have expected the folks at the New York Times to be almost orgasmic witnessing leftist after leftist bash former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at the inauguration of Bill de Blasio whilst touting income equality as the best thing since sliced bread.

Quite surprisingly, such wasn't the case Friday when the Times editorial board accused some of the speakers of being "graceless and smug":

Too bad the speakers on stage with [de Blasio] didn’t get the unity part, marring the event with backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug. Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In doing so, she made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James’s hand as Ms. James called for a government “that cares more about a child going hungry than a new stadium or a new tax credit for a luxury development.”

Dasani was profiled in a recent series of articles in The Times illustrating how bad things get for homeless families in the shelter system. Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg. So did the pastor whose invocation likened New York to a “plantation,” and Harry Belafonte, who strangely laid the problem of America’s crowded prisons at the feet of the former mayor, an utterly bogus claim, while saying Mr. Bloomberg shared responsibility for the nation’s “deeply Dickensian justice system.”

Mr. Bloomberg had his mistakes and failures, but he was not a cartoon Gilded Age villain. He deserved better than pointless and tacky haranguing from speakers eager to parrot Mr. de Blasio’s campaign theme.

Not surprisingly, the Times had nothing but affection for Hillary's husband writing, "It was up to former President Bill Clinton, ad-libbing some gracious thanks to Mr. Bloomberg, and Mr. de Blasio, who did the same, to try to bring the event back to a grown-up level."

Now that's what we would expect from the newspaper which just five days earlier published a lengthy front page piece claiming the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year had no al Qaeda links, but was instead a spontaneous reaction to an American-made anti-Islam film.