On the Booker beat

Come November, Cory Booker will be the newly elected United States Senator from New Jersey. As mayor of Newark and Democrat on the make, Booker appears to have been insulated from close scrutiny in years past. Having taken a close look at a few of the stories he’s been retailing over the years, my daughter Eliana is finding that he is something of a compulsive liar. Consider, for example, the case of T-Bone, Booker’s imaginary friend, or Booker’s riff on the late Wazn Miller. (Eliana updated the T-Bone case yesterday in the post “Booker: T-Bone Is Real, and I Know ‘Literally Hundreds’ of Drug Dealers.”)

Well, what did you expect?

But wait! There is more, and worse. As mayor of Newark, Booker signed into law an ordinance requiring landowners to register vacant properties with the city’s Office of Rent Control. Booker himself, however, failed to register an abandoned home that he owned in Newark and he seems to have avoided the penalty imposed by the ordinance he signed. Although Booker has since donated the home to a local charity, it remains unregistered and has proved to be the kind of health and safety hazard the ordinance sought to deter. The response of Booker’s campaign to Eliana’s inquiries is almost funny.

I’m not too thrilled that Eliana is pounding the streets of Newark to nail down the facts in the crazy, mixed-up files of Mr. Cory Booker, or that she isn’t going to be invited to Booker’s Christmas party this year, but at least she didn’t come away empty-handed. If you are a connoisseur of hypocrisy, you will enjoy her NRO column “Empty promise.”

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