Money Can’t Buy Happiness

And apparently it can’t buy brains, either, as Mayor Bloomberg proves by hosting a roundtable discussion on the Ft. Hood massacre in New York City attended by Siraj Wahhaj, who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Wahhaj said Bloomberg invited him to the roundtable and shook his hand when he entered the meeting room, which was closed to reporters.

"I think that if the mayor had any discomfort he would not have invited me," said Wahhaj, an imam at Masjid Al-Taqwa in Brooklyn.

Bloomberg, however, initially claimed not to know Wahhaj was there.

As he was leaving, a Channel 2 reporter asked the mayor if he was uncomfortable about Wahhaj's presence.

"I don't know. He's not here," the mayor responded. When told that Wahhaj was in fact in the meeting, Bloomberg reversed course.

"That one. Yes. We have to talk to everybody," he said. "That's what dialogue is all about. That's how you prevent tragedies."

Bloomberg's spokesman Stu Loeser later said it was aides, not the mayor himself, who invited Wahhaj and the others.

Ah, yes. The reflexive response by politicians caught in the act of doing something particularly stupid: poor staff-work.