Michael Moriarty -- Ripped from the Headlines!

By Nicholas Stix

Michael Moriarty recently attacked me in his Enter Stage Right column, “A journey down the River Stix: The flirtatious dances of fascism.”

As “Hubie” would have said, I was pleased as punch. What an honor, to be personally attacked in print by one of my favorite TV actors. I used to watch Moriarty every week on Law & Order, where he was one of the original co-stars, opposite George Dzundza (and later opposite Paul Sorvino and then Jerry Ohrbach, may he rest in peace), as Executive Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Stone. I loved the way with Moriarty’s Ben Stone, moral gravitas was inseparable from that third-generation (which meanwhile has gone on unto the fourth and fifth generations) Irish nasality, smoother than the nasality of a New York Irish cop, but nonetheless a first cousin to it.

Moriarty still acts, plays piano, sings, and is currently running for president of the United States of America from his home in British Columbia, Canada.

As the years went on, I noticed that increasingly, the “ripped from the headlines” quality that NBC used to sell Law & Order in its ads, was fraudulent. L&O would routinely take murders committed by blacks, but depict the killers as whites, or invent crimes that had either never been committed in New York, or not committed in the last fifty years, such as a white man murdering a black man for grabbing a taxicab ahead of him.

As I’ve written some articles exposing the show’s dishonesty (here and here), L&O’s producers do not number among my fans.

The odd thing about Moriarty’s jeremiad, is that it suffers from the sins of his old L&O boss, Dick Wolf. Moriarty makes empirical statements about life in New York and elsewhere that have no factual basis, and then draws moral conclusions from those false statements. Bad facts, bad logic, bad morals.

Based on a few essays of Moriarty’s that I had read in the past, his “River Stix” essay, and another I just read for background on him, his modus operandi is: 1. To have a basic attitude (“So-and-so is evil”); 2. To engage in stream-of-consciousness writing; 3. To occasionally come up with a good line -- the man has a touch of the poet -- which unfortunately, has no logical connection to what precedes or follows it, and may be mere rhetorical nonsense; and 4. To freely associate between the object of his ire and certain other despised characters from central casting.

In the context of the essay in question, Moriarty says: 1. Rudy Giuliani is a fascist (Boo! Hiss!); 2. Blah, blah, blah; 3. “Mussolini saved the Fuhrer’s bloody paintbrush with that deal in Rome” (nonsense, but it sounds great); and 4. Rudy = Hitler (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = Mussolini (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = wheat or straw (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = NYPD = sodomizing black, illegal immigrant suspects (Boo! Hiss!); Rudy = LAPD (Boo! Hiss!)… You get the picture. If you suspect I am misrepresenting Moriarty, read his essay and the column by yours truly that he attacked.

Now, let’s look at those passages of the essay in question that supposedly respond to me.

Moriarty: “The following is taken from an Enter Stage Right article about Rudolph Giuliani [different versions of my column appeared in numerous venues, including Men’s News Daily]:

“‘[New York Times columnist David] Brooks says that a courageous politician shies away from social questions, but that’s hogwash. John McCain is anti-abortion and supports the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And Giuliani doesn’t shy away from such questions either. He is enthusiastically opposed to respecting American citizens’ Second Amendment rights, and supports gay rights, women’s right to abortion, and the rights of illegal immigrants.’”

“The author of this basically pro-Giuliani profile, Nicholas Stix, never lived under Giuliani’s shining years as mayor. If he did, then he never read Bob Herbert of The New York Times. When the New York Police Department so quickly begins to turn into the Los Angeles Police Department and horror stories of summary executions in Spanish Harlem are listed and the whole series culminates in the torture of a Haitian immigrant in the basement toilet of an NYPD precinct house, well, you have a policy not entirely ordered by the Police Commissioner. You have a Mussolini somewhere in there. Since motive is the first question about crime, who benefited from the miraculous drop in crime? Mayor Giuliani did.”

It would be difficult to pack more dishonesty into a single paragraph than Moriarty did in the preceding one. Far from writing a valentine to Giuliani, I called him a liar of presidential proportions, and noted that under Giuliani, the NYPD engaged in a fraudulent underreporting of crime statistics of revolutionary proportions, a systemic fraud that has continued unabated under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. And as I showed almost seven years ago, a healthy chunk of Giuliani’s reduction in the welfare rolls was achieved through shifting tens of thousands of clients from welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANP) to much better paying federal disability Supplemental Security Income, which is disbursed through the Social Security Administration, and which is not counted in the welfare statistics. I also noted that I did not support Giuliani for president. The aforementioned criticisms notwithstanding, I did say that I consider Giuliani the greatest mayor New York has ever had. That was due to his success at running the city, in the face of the attempt by a racist cabal led by Al Sharpton to get the city burned to the ground, rather than permit a white man to govern it. (Giuliani had beaten the city’s first and only black mayor, socialist David Dinkins, in the 1993 election.)

Last Friday marked twenty years of my having lived continuously in New York City. And not only have I read hundreds of columns by Bob Herbert, but I have mercilessly mocked his dishonesty and racism.

In one of my favorite Herbert columns, about ten years ago a twenty-something black man suspected of auto theft had been shot dead by cops in his car in a fusillade in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The officers had reportedly shouted “freeze,” whereupon the victim reached down for something. It turned out that he was reaching for the anti-car theft device, “the club,” which Herbert assumed the officers should have known. Apparently, being psychic is one of the NYPD’s job requirements. According to Herbert, it turned out that the man was wanted for murder, but Herbert maintained that the police had no way of knowing that. So, in Herbert’s universe, the police must be psychic, when a felony suspect ignores their command and makes a sudden move, but not be psychic, when it comes to knowing that the same guy is a murder suspect. In other words, the cops are always wrong.

In the piece de resistance, Herbert quoted a black hairdresser named Miriam Dorvil, who claimed that while everyone else on the street ate pavement or rolled under a car, she stood in the crossfire, calmly smoking a cigarette. Dorvil added that the officers called the victim the “n-word,” just before shooting him. (Since Herbert did not say the officers in question were black, the reader was led to conclude that white officers had uttered the epithet -- in the heart of black Flatbush!) Herbert did not raise a journalistic eyebrow at any of Dorvil’s claims.

That was during Rudy Giuliani’s first term in office (January 1, 1994-December 31, 1997). Also during that term, Herbert penned a column in which he charged Giuliani with targeting black males, and threatened race riots, if the (non-existent) practice did not stop.

And yet, after spending eight years demonizing Giuliani’s crime policies, Herbert suddenly became a fan of them. In early 2002, Herbert praised the inroads Giuliani had supposedly made against crime. The reason for the about-face: Giuliani had just left office, due to term limits, and been succeeded by Michael Bloomberg. Herbert’s praise for Giuliani was as phony as the attacks he had made on him while he was in office. Herbert was already attacking Bloomberg, and needed a rhetorical straw man for contrast.

On May 19, 2003, five days after New York Times executive editor Howell Raines had publicly confessed that he had only kept incompetent, journalistic fraud Jayson Blair at the Times because of the color of Blair’s skin, Herbert announced,

Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair’s reporting.

A year or two ago, I came across a lefty blogger that considered Herbert an embarrassment, because he mindlessly repeats Democrat Party talking points.

Moriarty: “When the New York Police Department so quickly begins to turn into the Los Angeles Police Department …”

What does that mean? “LAPD, boo, hiss!”? Moriarty sounds like an Upper West Side Lefty who has given up on facts and arguments, and no longer bothers even to spout complete slogans. A well-informed reader is not obliged to guess at a writer’s meaning; even Bob Herbert isn’t that lazy. To read Moriarty, you’d think that the NYPD was constantly committing outrages against blacks. In fact, the majority-white NYPD shows more restraint toward black male suspects than just about any major police force. According to various Washington Post series, the most dangerous police departments in the nation, particularly in their harming of innocent black men, are the black-controlled Washington, DC, Prince George’s County, MD, Detroit and New Orleans forces. The NYPD’s problem is that black racists and white leftists exaggerate every NYPD incident carried out by white officers, ignore incidents for which black officers are responsible, and act as if incidents carried out by Hispanic officers were carried out by whites. Meanwhile, the national media almost never contrast the NYPD’s relatively restrained conduct to the routine violence and corruption of black-dominated police forces. Moriarty: “and horror stories of summary executions in Spanish Harlem are listed and the whole series culminates in the torture of a Haitian immigrant in the basement toilet of an NYPD precinct house, well, you have a policy not entirely ordered by the Police Commissioner. You have a Mussolini somewhere in there. Since motive is the first question about crime, who benefited from the miraculous drop in crime? Mayor Giuliani did.” Have you ever had too much coffee to drink, or too many worries to handle, and lay in bed with your mind racing 1000 miles a minute? That’s the way Michael Moriarty writes. What “summary executions in Spanish Harlem”? At least when Moriarty refers to “the torture of a Haitian immigrant” above and in a later paragraph, I know that he is talking about the 1997 Abner Louima case. Of course, Moriarty even gets that one wrong. He says that the weapon involved was a “nightstick,” when in fact it was a broken broom handle; more importantly, he insinuates that Louima was an illegal immigrant, and that Giuliani had ordered the assault. I am not aware of any reports saying that Louima was an illegal immigrant. As for Moriarty’s contention that Giuliani had a “motive” in the Louima case, I might be able to follow the man’s “logic” if I were tripping on LSD, but I’m not. According to the record and to my knowledge, the August 9, 1997 assault by Officer Justin Volpe on Abner Louima remains unparalleled in the history of the New York City Police Department. Moriarty: “The only plus side was the revelation of New York liberal hypocrisy at its worst. There were no protests about the evolving tyranny until the cops beat up a young Orthodox Jewish man. Only then was a parade organized, with Al Sharpton at the head and the rabbis right behind him.” What young orthodox Jewish man? The only case I know of that resembles Moriarty’s statement is that of Gideon Busch, a deranged man brandishing a hammer, who on August 30, 1999 was shot to death by police, after which Al Sharpton led a protest march. I know of no such “beating.” Is it possible that Moriarty was so lazy and sloppy that he shortchanged his own argument? Besides, following the tragic, February 4, 1999 shooting by four white policemen of illegal Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, leading leftists such as Susan Sarandon, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al. began weeks of daily illegal demonstrations in front of NYPD headquarters, in which over 1700 protesters were arrested. That’s almost seven months before the killing of Gideon Busch. Facts, Mr. Moriarty, facts! And of course, there was no lack of protests following Justin Volpe’s assault on Abner Louima. And I thought black supremacists were bad. At least, they rattle off the names of phony “victims.” How can you debate someone who speaks so vaguely, that you have to guess what the heck he’s talking about? And even when you can piece together what he’s talking about, you realize that he’s botched the entire story. Unlike Michael Moriarty, I wrote my first study on New York crime, race, and policing in 1990. He apparently has yet to begin studying the subject. Moriarty: “Liberal ladies, so enamored of the Mayor, shouted at the police, insulted them. Later, at a Puerto Rican Day parade, the police just let the local Spanish men fondle and “feel up” these so conveniently angry ladies. The cops didn’t lift a finger to help. “Well, they’d gone to Giuliani for a pay raise to be compensated for becoming criminals with badges and lowering the crime rate and Giuliani basically said, “What? And raise the budget? That’s my re-election war chest. You’re just lucky my judges and court kept you out of jail. “Gee, thanks, Mayor Rudy.” I am not aware of any “liberal ladies” who had been “enamored of the Mayor.” Rather, I heard socialist Manhattan women disparage him back in 1994, shortly after he’d been inaugurated, “He’s so ‘prosecutorial.’” The attacks on females at the Puerto Rican Day Parade occurred on June 11, 2000. The police were not standing down out of revenge against the Mayor, but because they had been explicitly ordered to “avoid confrontations with minority males.” Over twenty NYPD officers complained to Daily News reporters, and several complained to New York Post staffers afterwards. The Post quoted one officer as saying, “We were told not to do anything. They don’t want photos of altercations with minorities. It’s very frustrating when we’re told to have our blinders on.” (Whether any policemen complained to writers at the anti-NYPD New York Times, we’ll probably never know. What I do know, is that the Times did not report on any such complaints.) The attacks that day went beyond fondling to manual rape and robbery, and the majority of the attackers were black. But Moriarty screwed up and got one thing right -- though the socialist mainstream media emphasized attacks on Hispanic and black females, from what I could gather, it was mainly white women who were targeted that day. The two out-of-state black females who immediately called a press conference, seeking a $5 million payday, couldn’t be bothered to identify the police officers who supposedly brushed them off, or any of the men who supposedly molested them, and soon disappeared. It was far from clear that the two had even been in the state of New York the day of the parade. What surprised me about the post-wilding newspaper reports was that the officers were getting explicit orders to avoid law-breaking minority males. I had observed NYPD officers doing just that as far back as 1993. The notion that the NYPD was “targeting” minority males was part and parcel of the racial profiling hoax, a Big Lie which in New York was invented partly out of racial revenge for Giuliani’s electoral victory over his black predecessor, partly in order to help Hillary Clinton beat Giuliani in the 2000 Senate race, and partly an extension of a national campaign to handcuff white police officers, and embolden minority criminals. In any event, police were besieged as never before during 1999, which was dominated by the racial profiling hoax. Giuliani ended up dropping out of the Senate race, due to having contracted prostate cancer. Moriarty: “As for Stix’s opinion of Giuliani’s mayoralty: Well, if beating a Haitian, pushing a nightstick up his rectum and then down his throat is ‘pro-illegal alien,’ I’m a bit confused. So there’s the lie to that.” Wow! So, you can refute opponents simply by stringing together non sequiturs, followed by a “So, there.” Moriarty may live in Canada, but that is chutzpah worthy of a New Yorker! Moriarty: “As for his pro-abortion views and desire to keep guns out of the hands of citizens, I have no doubt this little Mussolini is all for it. How Stix could label Giuliani as ‘Mr. Courage’ after his shameless exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy is way beyond me. “It’s a real Latin American appetite that ends up giving the world Mussolinis on both sides of the political aisle: witness Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Congratulations, sir. Your name doesn’t sound the least bit Mediterranean and perhaps that’s the reason why you really don’t know the price for dreaming of Mr. Strongman.” It was David Brooks, not me, who called Giuliani a “courage politician.” I know; people are always confusing me with New York Times columnists. As for saying that Giuliani engaged in the “shameless exploitation” of 911, that is beyond the pale. For all of Giuliani’s faults, which I know much better than Michael Moriarty does, if there is any justice, historians will still be marveling 100 years from now at what Rudy Giuliani did on and in the days immediately after 911. Even if he had previously been a mediocre mayor, the way he led New Yorkers up from the rubble alone would have made him the greatest mayor in New York history. Michael Moriarty is a good actor, but like another TV actor (Martin Sheen) who is marvelous as long as he has a script to read from, he needs to hire a ghost writer, preferably someone who reads more than just headlines, before making any public statements beyond, “Check, please.”