Michael Bloomberg is a liar.
Yes, the same guy who believes an “epidemic of dishonesty” is plaguing our democracy and probably tells his girlfriend “I love that color on you!” even though he fucking hates it to the core of his very being, is a lying-ass liar.
And since Maury Povich isn’t around to expose this 77-year-old fraud for the unrepentant fabricator that he is, I suppose the onus falls on me to do the Lord’s will.
In May 2018, during a commencement speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas, that now seems oddly prophetic, the former New York City mayor bristled, “How did we go from a president who could not tell a lie to politicians who cannot tell the truth?”
He added, “There is now more tolerance for dishonesty in politics than I have seen in my lifetime. The only thing more dangerous than dishonest politicians who have no respect for the law is a chorus of enablers who defend their every lie.”
Considering Bloomberg boasts a net worth of approximately $54 billion, it’s safe to assume his chorus of enablers are on his payroll. And while I can’t corroborate his respect for the law, I can speak on his ardent support of all things stop-and-frisk—that is, until he had a presidential campaign to jumpstart.
He’s since gone on an apology tour in a desperate attempt to right one of his most egregious wrongs, and on Friday, fixed his face to say that the only reason he’s apologizing for stop-and-frisk now is because—wait for it—he was never asked about it prior to his presidential bid.
During an interview with CBS News, anchor Gayle King pressed him on the peculiar timing of his newfound remorse. In response, he offered an absurdly weak explanation.
“Well, nobody asked me about it until I started running for president,” Bloomberg said. “So come on.”
Oh, is that right?
Receipts—courtesy of the Washington Post:
As recently as October, weeks before Bloomberg announced he was entering the Democratic presidential primary, The Washington Post asked him about the policy and Bloomberg maintained that it had made the city safer.
“I came into a situation where an awful lot of people were killing an awful lot of other people. And it was all pretty much one community,” Bloomberg said. “And I just said we are going to do anything we can to stop the carnage. The first thing was stop the murders. And we brought down the incarceration rate in jails by a third, mostly minority kids. We brought down the murder rate by 50 percent, from 600 to 300 murders, and you know who would have been killed.”
Receipts—courtesy of the New York Times, right after a federal judge ruled that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional:
Striking a defiant tone, Mr. Bloomberg said, “You’re not going to see any change in tactics overnight.” He said he hoped the appeal process would allow the current stop-and-frisk practices to continue through the end of his administration because “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.”
Receipts—courtesy of the New York Daily News:
Bloomberg defended the controversial policy in the wake of an alarming spate of gun violence earlier this month and growing criticism that the initiative amounts to racial profiling.
“If the NYCLU is allowed to determine policing strategies in our city, many more children will grow up fatherless and many more children will not grow up at all,” the mayor said at a Queens church.
Receipts—courtesy of CNN:
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg offered a full-throated defense of the New York Police Department’s use of “stop and frisk” policing Tuesday evening, attributing the city’s declining murder rate during his tenure as mayor to the controversial policy.
“We focused on keeping kids from going through the correctional system ... kids who walked around looking like they might have a gun, remove the gun from their pockets and stop it,” Bloomberg said. He added that “the result of that was, over the years, the murder rate in New York City went from 650 a year to 300 a year when I left.”
And there’s a whole ass op-ed from 2013 that he wrote extolling the virtues of stop-and-frisk:
Every American has a right to walk down the street without being targeted by the police because of his or her race or ethnicity. At the same time, every American has a right to walk down the street without getting mugged or killed. Both are civil liberties — and we in New York are fully committed to protecting both equally, even when others are not.
I could keep going but sadly, I have other shit to do.
Besides, there are plenty of other journalists ready and willing to call out Bloomberg for what he is: a bold-faced liar.
So instead of dragging this dude through the dirt any further, I’ll just revisit his commencement speech at Rice University and let him tell you exactly why his flagrant dishonesty makes him unfit to be president.
“When elected officials speak as though they are above the truth, they will act as though they are above the law,” Bloomberg said. “And when we tolerate dishonesty, we get criminality. Sometimes, it’s in the form of corruption. Sometimes, it’s an abuse of power. And sometimes, it’s both.”
My sentiments exactly.