I just heard a pro-Bloomberg campaign ad on Air America

“As mayor, he gave $250,000 to the same Republican party-building effort that Representative Tom DeLay is now charged with using to launder political money.” Here.

This is why I won’t vote for Mike Bloomberg, even though he’s a competent and sensible mayor and a welcome relief after the crazy Rudy years. For no good reason, our billionaire mayor has been funding the corrupt right-wing Republican machine of Tom DeLay and other right-wing Republicans who use their power to starve our city of its rightful resources and attack our values as un-American. He says he’s buying influence. Fine. Where is it, bub? Congress has even cut the money promised after 9/11. Pataki won’t even pony up the money the courts have ordered to provide New York City school children with a classrooms and supplies so they don’t have to do math in the bathroom and English in what used to be the gym. Note that the article explains that “Mr. Bloomberg also donated $2,000 to President Bush in 2003 and, as has been widely reported, gave $5 million in cash to support the Republican National Convention here.” All that is bad enough. Bloomberg was so eager to play the role of the good boy that he unlawfully ordered hundreds of innocent people arrested during the Republican convention whose only crime was standing up for the principles in which he professes to believe.

Perhaps he’s a better mayor than Freddie would be. To be honest, I’d not be amazed were that to be the case. (And what’s more, he’s so popular among Democrats and liberals that a Ferrer victory is likely to require some sort of Divine Intervention of a kind that is not presently imaginable.) But whatever Bloomberg pretends his millions have bought for the city, it has cost us far more. And irony of ironies, he could have gotten the Democratic nomination if he wanted it and none of this would be necessary.