New York
My last week in the Bagel and then back to good old London. And it’s just as well I’m still here, or some of Sunny Marlborough’s children might take a swipe at me. Last week I wrote about the old duke, correctly calling him Sunny, a diminutive which derives from Sunderland, one of his family handles. Somehow the ‘u’ turned into an ‘o’, as in Sonny Corleone, plus an ‘l’ went missing, which reminded me of the bad old days of 1977, when disgrundled printers massacred names on purpose. But not to worry. Thanks to Lady T. and the ghastly Murdoch the printers have gone the way of good manners, and last week was just an aberration. And speaking of bad old days, guns and murder are back in vogue here in the Bagel, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the biggest bluff and phoney in the city is mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Let’s take it from the top. Although Rudy Giuliani tried to run me out of town for some rude remarks I made about our Puerto Rican cousins, he was the best mayor the Bagel ever had as far as bringing violent crime down was concerned. What Rudi did was to assemble street-crime units with aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics which in no time resulted in a record number of gun confiscations, and played a key role in driving down violent crime. Governor Pataki’s pledge to reinstate capital punishment also helped. The latter’s pledge was gone with the wind as soon as Pataki was elected, and Bloomberg playing the PC card did the rest. Four years after the age of Rudy, guns are back with a vengeance and people are dropping like the proverbial flies. Not that it worries Bloomberg a hell of a lot, who is anti the death penalty for thugs who shoot cops, and who doesn’t believe in law-abiding citizens owning guns.
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