Shelly's A Commie!

Our businessman mayor has never claimed to be a scholar. But last week Bloomberg displayed a particularly warped understanding of local history, to say nothing of American patriotism. The day the West Side stadium dream died-insert chicken strut here-Mayor Mike said that the coalition that deep-six'd the project had "let down America" and damaged New York's "spirit." If the city had this kind of negative attitude in the early part of the 20th century, he huffed, "we never would have built Carnegie Hall, we never would have built Radio City Music Hall, we never would have built the airports or the Triborough Bridge."

Bad examples.

We won't even dignify the airport and bridge references with a response. As for Radio City and Carnegie, they would've gone up just fine, since in both cases government handouts were neither asked for nor given. The Rockefellers put up the money for Radio City, and Andrew Carnegie paid for 90 percent of Carnegie Hall. The rest came from these mysterious life forms known as "investors."

Imagine: private developers using private money to build on private property. We're all entitled to our own definitions of the American Way, but since the mayor is a free-enterprise sort of guy, it's a little odd to hear him say that not giving a $600 million subsidy to a billionaire, who in turn represents an enormous cartel, somehow qualifies as unpatriotic.