Mike’s a bit pro-Occupied

After hearing Mayor Bloomberg offer another lame excuse for why he waited two months to clear Zuccotti Park, I feel like the exasperated Aflac duck trying to make sense of Yogi Berra. At least Yogi and the duck are good for a laugh.

Not so our confused and confusing mayor. AWOL while anarchists and derelicts took over a prime piece of Gotham, he now says he delayed acting because he feared a judge would block an eviction.

“You have to give people time to express themselves,” he said Friday. “If you had tried to do it earlier, it’s not clear to me that the courts would have permitted it.”

Blaming the courts is a new twist on the mayor’s mistaken view of the First Amendment, which he often cited as the reason why he permitted laws to be broken and forced residents and businesses to suffer the invading vagabonds. (Notably, the mayor’s concern for free expression doesn’t extend to the press, with most reporters kept too far away to witness the actual eviction.)

Moreover, because the court ruled the First Amendment did not include the right to set up tents and tarps, there is no reason to think the ruling would have been different had the eviction happened earlier. So the timing excuse is all in Bloomy’s head.

There’s something else in his head, too, and it probably explains why Bloomberg has been such an unsteady and uncertain commander during the crisis. The mayor, like President Obama and other liberal Democrats, actually sympathizes with the occupiers.

Here’s the evidence. Tuesday evening, after the Zuccotti Park eviction, the mayor’s media company posted an editorial that was shockingly bullish on the Occupy movement. It saluted Kalle Lasn, an avowed anarchist and the founder of the Canadian Web site Adbusters, which helped start the trouble.

Lasn, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, “is right that there is much to celebrate,” the Bloomberg editorial gushed. “A small group of people has imprinted on the American and global consciousness an important message that must be addressed: Inequality is growing extreme, and opportunity is becoming constricted.”

It said the occupiers “struck a chord across political and economic divides the world over” and compared them favorably to the Tea Party. The opinion piece concluded by saying, “We applaud the discussion that’s been opened, and hope it can turn constructively to the mission of seeing that all Americans have an equal opportunity to succeed.”

Beyond being wrongheaded, the editorial is markedly different from Bloomberg’s critical comments on the occupation. So much so that it’s fair to ask whether his company’s editorials represent the mayor’s thinking. Bloomberg media editor in chief Matthew Winkler answered that question in December, when the writers were hired.