In a feat of either unbending loyalty or quiet ratfucking, today's New York Post allowed doomed Republican mayoral nominee Joe Lhota to comment on the recent acts of lurid violence on the West Side:

Lhota blamed the stop-and-frisk crackdown for so impeding cops that outlaw motorcycle gangs are able to rampage freely.

[...]

“We have seen an increase in shootings, rapes and in the past few days a horrific attack on a father in front of his family and five people stabbed on the Upper West Side,” Lhota said.

This is how magical the thinking about stop-and-frisk is among its diehard proponents: somehow, a campaign of routinely and indiscriminately searching young people on the street in high-crime neighborhoods would have prevented the Riverside Park stabber—reportedly a 43-year-old, mentally disturbed homeless man—from attacking strangers in a low-crime neighborhood. Likewise, it's stop-and-frisk that would have allowed the NYPD to keep the bikers from roaming around the city breaking traffic laws. As opposed to, say, the NYPD enforcing traffic laws.

[Image via Getty]