Our Wise Old Egg, the Sr. of McMorrow and McMorrow, weighs in on the latest disinformercials from Cablevision.

Anti-Stadium Ads Getting Funny in Their Desperation

I watch the anti-Stadium commercials for laughs. They are becoming so distorted in their desperate campaign to thwart the will of the people, they are really funny.

The latest one reminds me of the little man who got up at the Borough President’s hearing on the Stadium and told us, trying not to choke up, how the building of this magnificent stadium was going to take food out of the mouths of poor children. I kid you not, that was his message. If you were there you remember him, a little fighting cock of a guy standing down front and, like a reverse cheerleader, wig-wagging his arriving people to sit in the booing section.

He talked about the homeless, the poor and the starving little children who were going to be deprived by the cost of this edifice, and we looked at each other and said, What the hell is he talking about?

Comes now the new Cable(double)vision ad. They spent a yard full of money to set up a subway station with a handsome sign that says Raised Fares, with extras portraying suffering subway riders, and the commercial tells us ominously that if we get the stadium your subway fares are going to go up!

This is the despicable politics of fear – If this guy wins, you will be blown away by the atomic bomb! – with which we are all familiar.

Let’s look at the false premise on which it’s built: that the ballpark would cause the subway fare to go up.

When I was a boy the subway fare was a nickel. Then, after World War II, it became a dime. Then fifteen, then a quarter, then half a buck, with the inexorable march of time and costs – need I go on? Today it’s two bucks.

Does anybody believe that it will not go up again? With the totally proper increases in salaries and costs, of course it will, as surely as the changing of the seasons. The charge that it will be the stadium’s fault when the fare goes up is like blaming Mayor Bloomberg when fall turns into winter. – TMcM

 

Go, Cablevision! Another Dog-do Commercial!

Regarding that dog-do “Mayor Bloomberg, that simply isn’t true!” anti-stadium commercial Cablevision is running: Our late doggie who passed away pooped better sense than that.

The commercial tries to make the point that it’s not important to get this settled now, because the decision on which city will get the 2012 Olympics won’t be made until 2005, and no country has ever started building an Olympic stadium seven years before the Games.

These paid yo-yos blithely ignore the fact that once the decision on this $1.4-billion dollar project is made, the sports-Javits Center project will either be alive or dead forever. It doesn’t matter whether it’s made in 2005 or 2010: The International Olympic Committee needs our decision by next year, and if we don’t vote resoundingly “Yes,” there will be no Olympic Stadium, destined to stand for perhaps 500 years – or maybe, like the Coliseum in Rome, for thousands, in New York City. ............................................................................................................. – TMcM