The Maniacal Response to the Mayor’s Request for an Apology from the JPCA

Be warned that what you are about to read is a 5 page ranting of a raving lunatic named Bob Doocey. The letter is a response to the Mayor’s office letter requesting an apology for the JPCA’s shameful tactics. Bobby Holden commands Fido Doocey to help him do his dirty work.

This is just another example of how delusional Holden and his cronies really are. They can attack, malign and scream but when asked for an apology they play innocent like little puppies frolicking in Juniper Park (unleashed). We love when they champion the Constitution when it suits their needs, however, they have been know on many occasions to prevent others who disagree with them their inalienable rights!

And let’s not forget that Mayor Bloomberg was the JPCA Man of the Year twice! But as always, if you disagree with Almighty Bob your character is assassinated. Our community must rid ourselves of these despicable and counterproductive tactics by Robert Holden and the Juniper Park Civic Association!

Here is the letter,



Dear Commissioner Parvizi,

Your letter addressed to Mr. Bob Holden, President of the Juniper Park Civic Association, dated September 7th 2007, can only be described as an impudent and impertinent attack on the First Amendment.

You marshaled the office of the Mayor and the Community Affairs Unit to threaten the First Amendment rights of citizens of this community. You threatened the rights of not only the protestors who attended the rally at Saint Savior’s that day, but also the members and officers of the Juniper Park Civic Association., and, by extension, the members of the larger community who hope that we accomplish useful improvements when we act.

And you performed all this threatening on our dime. We pay, you threaten?

What we never do is request permission from any level of government or any public servants to exercise our rights. What we always expect is that each level of government and every public servant understand their limits, roles, responsibilities and authority to assist us in performing our volunteer community service.

What is entirely unacceptable is for any level of government or public servant to have a crude and coarse belief that we citizens conform to some unconstitutional notion that the public servants dictate the modes of behavior, or the form, content, time or place of a citizen’s or community’s communication with any government agency or public servant.

Your letter represents a depraved indifference to your legal obligations and limits as a public servant, and is a demonstration of your abject failure to understand the actual extent of your authority.

The people threatened by you and the Mayor are unpaid volunteers, while you and the Mayor are employees of the city whose salaries are funded by the very same citizens who pay for lavish salaries, limos, expenses, offices, and staff.

Inasmuch as we the people foot the bill, we do not tolerate lectures from those we pay to serve us.

And, we find unacceptable any lecture chastising and threatening us for our use of our inalienable First Amendment rights – rights you and the Mayor took an Oath of Office to uphold. Neither you nor the Mayor created those rights, nor can you withhold or curtail those rights.

But, you blithely tried.

The most despicable result of the letter from you and the Mayor is the fact that it reveals that neither of you understand the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment, and that you both treat your Oath of Office as nothing more than an exercise required as a token to enter the office entrusted to you by us.

Was it necessary that we take time to inform you of your role and responsibilities in government? Why is it necessary that we take the time to instruct you that your and the Mayor’s job is to serve not to rule?

Why did it not occur to either you or the Mayor to have the appropriate legal specialists review your threatening letter before you published it?

Sensible legal experts would have told you:

You and the Mayor, along with all elected and appointed officials executed an oath of office that said that: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of _____, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Yet with your letter, approved by Mayor Bloomberg, you have casually trashed that oath while you openly attack the First Amendment rights of those you wish to antagonize.

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free expression thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

What difficulty do you find in protecting and defending the entire Constitution?

“Petitioning” has come to signify any nonviolent, legal means of encouraging or a disapproving government action, whether directed to the judicial, executive or legislative branch. Lobbying, letter writing, e-mail campaigns, testifying before tribunals, filing lawsuits, supporting referenda, collecting signatures for ballot initiatives, peaceful protests and picketing, all public articulation of issue, complaints and interests designed to spur government action qualifies under the petition clause, even if the activities partake of other First Amendment freedoms.

The right to petition the government isn’t just words on some old dusty parchment. The Founding Fathers knew that eventually too many men [and women] in power would lose sight of their purpose in being part of a servant government and turn into tyrants. The right to petition the government with a redress of grievance by the very people being governed is an unalienable right that has been trampled upon and almost forgotten by the people themselves.

But we haven’t forgotten. The engine for most Civic associations is the exercise of the First Amendment, particularly the Petition clause.

For example, the sensitive “victim” of a political cartoon, Matt Gorton, has complained of the manufactured offence three and a half months too late. For starters, Gorton has definitely refused top cooperate with the Juniper Park Civic Association because- as he himself openly stated in a loud, obscenity-laden rant, that because the JPCA had the audacity to exercise its Constitutional right to petition the (of New York City) by pursuing a lawsuit regarding the Mayor’s plan to unleash dogs in our city parks, the Mayor was never going to f**ing support you in any future proposals.

Isn’t it odd, that Gorton felt free to threaten (on behalf of the Mayor) to shut down access (any additional petitioning of the government redress grievances) because we had already exercised that right? And that threat occurred long prior to his newly discovered sensitivity to a political cartoon (Sound familiar? Sound like the Jihadists sensitivity to the political cartoons in Denmark?) Gorton lived up to the threat. He definitely refused to participate in converting Saint Saviour’s land to a city Park.

And, though Gorton’s long ago tirade was cowardly in that he failed to put it in writing as you have done, your threat is simply a continuation of that original tantrum.

But, now, long after the appearance of a political cartoon used at a protest, he finds himself “offended”? A political cartoon is entirely protected by the First Amendment, as was the very protest in which it appeared. And the nature of the cartoon was entirely apropos for the situation under protest-the destruction of nearly 200 trees whose age neared 150 years for the purpose of preventing conversion of the land into a park. Gorton’s name on the cartoon was completely appropriate and protected.

So, using this newly manufactured “offense” you demand an apology? Quite the reverse! We demand an apology from the Mayor and the CAU for your attack on our use of our inalienable Constitutional rights under the First Amendment.

Of the many breathtakingly arrogant elements of your letter, one of the most feculent is your unconstitutional demand that we shape the content, expression, and manner of our use of the First Amendment to your requirements that we apologize to specific people in public for a political cartoon. With what legal authority do you make such a demand?

You also describe the political cartoon as “a crude personal attack”> An attack against whom. How was it crude? Who defines crude? With what legal authority? Harry Truman said the obvious: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!”

You say that: “I certainly did not appreciate seeing what could be perceived as a death threat against one of my staff splashed across the front page of the paper” Frankly, who cares what you appreciate? My compliments to the artist who composed the political cartoon for grabbing the attention of the [free] press and, of the First Amendment was unable to sting you, Bloomberg and Groton Sufficiently enough to allow you to use the name “Saint Saviour’s” anywhere in your offensive letter. You failed to include the name of the very issue that prompted the rally and the political cartoon. Why is that? Here’s that name: “Save Saint Saviour’s” Now. Now that wasn’t very difficult, was it?

I don’t care if you’re happy (or not) to come to the table. It’s your job to come to the table. You are paid to come to the table. So, you’ll come to the table or forfeit your pay- is that integrity?

You cheekily state that “across the table will be a group of mature adults whose goals are to improve their community through productive dialogue and work, and not to stage cheap political stunts…”

You proceed: “If you are willing to work with us under the conditions I’ve asked for….There are lines, even in the political arena, and your group has certainly crossed one.”

What qualifications did Bloomberg find you have for you to make such a sleazy threat? You don’t make conditions for us to get you to perform your job. That is son beyond the limits of the law and your oath of office that it verges on criminal corruption.

When will the Mayor and his appointees come to understand that all his and your behavior is limited by the Constitution, and that he and you are entirely beholden to the citizens? He and you have the obligation-the duty-to serve our interests; we do not have any obligation to serve the Mayor or your interests. And so far, your letter demonstrates that his and your interests are petty.

Then there is your insulting distribution list. You have the audacity to cc Dennis Gallagher in on your letter? Are you saying that the Mayor supports an indicted rapist of a grandmother? Is that how desperate for support the Mayor is in raping a community’s Constitutional rights?

Why did you fail to cc Tony Avella, an elected official who co-sponsored the protest , and who has spoken often of his strong support for converting the property of Saint Saviour’s to a park?

Why did you fail to cc your own colleague, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe? Is that failure because you and the Mayor are fully aware that Benepe is already fully on board with you in your determined refusal to fulfill your Oath of Office?

Why must we instruct you and the Mayor regarding the First Amendment and your Oath of Office?

Civilizations rise or fall on the citizenry’s capacity to make distinctions. Your letter’s crude terminology demonstrates your incapacity to make those necessary distinctions. Study the US Constitution for starters. Take an unpaid sabbatical to study. You should have already been equipped with that information.

You conclude your impudent letter by demanding that we abuse our own right to silence by requiring an apology (for a manufactured offense) in trade for exercising our Constitutional rights to petition the government on any issue that concerns us. Gorton’s manufactured offence does not concern us, so no apology is forthcoming.

Robert E. Doocey
Juniper Park Civic Association
Executive Board Member

This would be so hilarious if it wasn’t so delusional and hypocritical. The Mayor did not say that they could not protest or prevent them from using the poster, he is just asking for an apology for a distasteful and incendiary poster. However, the JPCA has turned this into a fiasco and tries to spin as an attack on their First Amendment rights. Bob Doocey would yell fire in a movie theater so Holden could get free popcorn. They are truly an organization that has lost touch with they people they are suppose to represent and have become an angry mob whose main goal is destroy our community.

Here is a brief (and very layman’s) attempt to educate Mr. Doocey about free speech.
You see Mr. Doocey; there are certain words, pictures, and expressions that are not protected under the First Amendment. For example, any speech that would be considered obscene, provoke violence or incite hate or rioting is not protected. Free speech is not absolute.

In 1942, the Supreme Court sustained the conviction of a Jehovah's Witness who addressed a police officer as a "God dammed racketeer" and "a damned fascist" (Chaplinksy v. New Hampshire). The Court's opinion in the case stated that there was a category of face-to-face epithets, or "fighting words," that was wholly outside of the protection of the First Amendment: those words "which by their very utterance inflict injury" and which "are no essential part of any exposition of ideas."

In Roth v. United States, 1957 the adjudication over the constitutional law of obscenity began. I will spare you with the all the details, however a very important statement came from the case, “the unconditional phrasing of the First Amendment was not intended to protect every utterance.''

In Virginia v Black (2003), the Court divided on the question of whether a state could prohibit cross burning carried out with the intent to intimidate. A majority of the Court concluded that, because cross-burning has a history as a "particularly virulent form of intimidation," Virginia could prohibit that form of expression while not prohibiting other types of intimidating expression.

As with the lynching poster displayed by the JPCA, we can conclude that because lynching has a history as a “particularly virulent form of intimidation” that it should not be protected speech.