Blooming (Useful) Idiot

If a triumphalist mosque does indeed rise in the Ground Zero neighbourhood, don't blame honey-tongued Imam and Rauf and his Missus. Blame bone-headed Mayor Mike Bloomy. From the New York Post:

(I)t turns out that Team Bloomberg was heavily involved in operating the political machinery needed to ensure that various regulatory agencies approved the controversial project -- which has rightly drawn the ire of many 9/11 survivors and victims' families.

Even to the point of pressing Community Board 1 to cast an approving vote -- so that the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission could be given the "political cover" he so urgently sought before his agency denied landmark status to the existing building.

That not only raises First Amendment questions -- it also provides serious doubts about the legitimacy of the LPC vote, which appears to have been dictated far more by politics than by any consideration of the building's architectural and historical merit.

Bloomberg's community affairs commissioner even ghost-wrote a letter to CB1 on behalf of Daisy Khan, wife of mosque promoter Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Meanwhile, officials intervened to obtain permits so that prayers could be conducted at the site.

Bloomberg's office maintains that the mayor's staff did nothing out of the ordinary on behalf of the mosque.

Nothing that any clueless dhimmi with his head up his buttski wouldn't do, that is.

This one should be required reading at Bloomy's City Hall

Update: He isn't much good at managing the aftereffects of a blizzard, either. (You figure that a billionaire must have some "smarts," but Bloomy seems determined to keep his hidden.)