AND THEN DE BLASIO MADE OUT WITH SUKHREET GABEL AND KILLED YANKEL ROSENBAUM.

Bob McManus at City Journal:

History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it whispers warnings. The wise will pay heed. 

Whether the ice-rink shooting at New York City’s Bryant Park, an arduously restored urban jewel at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, was an aberration or a harbinger remains to be seen. But the gunplay prompted unhappy recollections of the not-so-distant past, when the enclave was known as Needle Park and the New York Times described it as “a cesspool of crime and vice” only sporadically patrolled by police, if at all.

...memories linger of a time when New York had truly lost its way, when it couldn’t summon the will to resist dysfunction or even articulate a right to self-defense—to say nothing of self-respect.

Soon Bill de Blasio will be mayor...

Bill de Blasio is six weeks from inauguration as Mayor, but he's already on the hook for a mini-crime wave and junkies from thirty years ago. Is it right that one man should have such power?

Things like Bernie Goetz on the Downtown No. 2 train, on Dec. 22, 1984—the night he opened fire on four black teenagers who he said were menacing him with a screwdriver. The episode touched off a debate on race, crime, and the right to self-defense that seethed for years. Nobody was neutral on Bernie Goetz. He was the man who refused to be victimized, or he was a racist gunman—pick one. Goetz did eight months on Rikers Island, then drifted off into semi-obscurity. But there he was last month, smirk and all, back in court on a minor drug-peddling charge. He’s no longer a threat of any sort, just a timely reminder, as the debate over the future of Pax Giuliani in the age of de Blasio gains energy.

If Bernie Goetz sees his shadow, we get four more years of John Lindsay.

Things like Sonny Carson, an architect of the racist boycott of a Korean grocery in Brooklyn that shamed the city for six months in 1990—an event that then-mayor David Dinkins couldn’t bring himself even obliquely to criticize. Ugly stuff, not to be repeated. But there was the beyond-bitter entertainer Harry Belafonte, channeling Carson in a Brooklyn church the Sunday before Election Day. Conservative political contributors Charles and David Koch, he said, are “white supremacists . . . men of evil . . . [similar to] the men who would belong to the Ku Klux Klan.” Americans are entitled to their views, of course, even haters in their dotage. And this outburst would have scant significance—except that soon-to-be-mayor-elect de Blasio sat smiling as Belafonte sputtered on. Much as Dinkins, with his silence, encouraged Carson’s racist rants.

You see the connection: Carson instigated a boycott of Korean delis, and Belafonte talked shit about two of the richest men in America. It's practically the same thing.

Now, some pathologies never go away, which doubtless explains the city’s just-concluded Banksy carnival—the media celebration of an anonymous, high-end graffiti vandal who may or may not be a competent artist, but who sure knows how to turn a buck off defacing property. Banksy, a Brit, recently returned home after a month in the city creating “art” that sold for six figures (perhaps boosting de Blasio’s argument that some people just need taxing.) It was all harmless fun, except that the city has been there, done that, and doesn’t need a return trip...

The good news is the new wave of graffiti will be done by rich British performance artists, so no one can call conservatives racist when they complain.

The reviews are in:

And yet 74% of them voted for de Blasio. Must have a... Death Wish.

Tune in a few weeks from now, when the increased imminence of Mayor de Blasio causes 9/11.

UPDATE. Commenters are performing at a Broadway level. "Boy, they'll jump at any shadow, huh?" says Batocchio. "But it stands to reason, since shadows are black."

Many notice the commenters at McManus' page who, unlike our own, tend to destroy rather than restore one's faith in humanity with their gibberish about "Liberals and Black race pimps," etc. "It's not exactly like a bathroom wall," notes Hob, "it's like a cross between a bathroom wall and the letter column of some mimeographed Klan zine..."

"Let me know when the full DeBlasio effect has kicked in so I can take the Acela and go wilding on reactionaries," says Cato the Censor. You and me both, comrade! Time to get some jumbos and cheap rents back up in this bitch.