To the best of our knowledge, no senior aide to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was arrested overnight, though with this City Hall you never can tell. It may call itself a model of transparency, but translucence is more like it, at best.

That translucence (at best) has caused Mr. Bloomberg to shoot himself once again in the foot. Self-inflicted wounds are becoming almost routine as he nears the midpoint of a third term that he simply had to have, and manipulated the political system to get.

Mayoral inattentiveness bred a scandal over the CityTime payroll system, plagued with corruption and enormous cost overruns. Arrogance led to Mr. Bloomberg’s appointment of an unqualified social friend to be schools chancellor. A combination of both forces, inattentiveness and arrogance, resulted in the mayor’s cavalier response to last December’s blizzard.
There are unmistakable signs of raggedness at City Hall, confirmed the other day by a New York Times analysis of the statistics that Mr. Bloomberg holds dear. Police and Fire Department response times in emergencies have begun to slow. Families are staying longer in homeless shelters. Streets are dirtier. More water mains are breaking.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that the mayor’s approval rating has sunk. In a Times/CBS News poll last month, it fell to 45 percent, its lowest level in six years.

With his smooth handling of Tropical Storm Irene, Mr. Bloomberg seemed to be getting his groove back. But now he has gone back to foot-shooting. Worse, he has lost a large measure of credibility with his unapologetic half-truths about why Stephen Goldsmith left as deputy mayor for operations.

It took a month for New Yorkers to learn the real reason, by way of The New York Post: Mr. Goldsmith had been arrested in Washington and jailed for the better part of two days on a domestic violence complaint.

After that story came out, the mayor’s instinct was to go into hiding. When he finally showed his face on Sunday, he wrapped himself in a cloak of honor. You see, he didn’t want to make matters worse for the Mr. Goldsmith and his wife, Margaret. “We, as a policy, should try to treat each other, particularly those who devote their lives to public service, as humanely as possible,” he said.

On Monday, before the West Indian Day Parade, he said that “we really don’t know what happened” between the battling Goldsmiths.

You can make yourself dizzy trying to track the mayor’s inconsistencies.

He really didn’t know what happened. So why, then, was the arrest itself reason enough to require that Mr. Goldsmith pack his bags? And if the deputy had to go, why were New Yorkers, who paid the man’s salary, unworthy of being told what happened?

As for supposedly humane treatment, why did Mr. Goldsmith deserve it but not another city employee in a comparable domestic situation? In mid-August, a school safety agent was arrested and charged with harassing his wife by phone after they had separated. Mr. Bloomberg’s Police Department didn’t hesitate to announce this man’s situation and his identity.

On Monday, the mayor drew a perplexing distinction between an arrest of a city worker made in New York, where “we know what happens here,” and one made in “another jurisdiction,” where “we’re not familiar with their procedures.”

Got it. Washington has police rules that are totally alien. It might as well be Kandahar.

Matters would be different, Mr. Bloomberg added, if “somebody does something outside of New York that has to do with their official business in New York.” But that wasn’t the case with Mr. Goldsmith. He was off-duty when arrested. (So, too, by the way, was the school safety agent.)

O.K., let’s follow this reasoning. What if a deputy mayor on vacation in Washington is caught up in a barroom brawl, and is arrested for punching someone’s lights out? By Mr. Bloomberg’s logic, New Yorkers are not entitled to learn about the arrest because the deputy was off-duty and, besides, who knows what procedures the Washington police follow.

But why even bother wading through the inconsistencies? The core reality is simple enough: Mr. Bloomberg plays by separate rules for himself and those close to him. It has always been thus. It is why, for example, his City Hall staff receives large pay raises while other municipal employees are told to tighten their belts and instructed to do more with less. And it is why the telling of half-truths doesn’t trouble the unapologetic mayor one bit.

A half-truth is, of course, also a half-lie. It brings to mind a line from the incomparable “Lawrence of Arabia,” in which a double-dealing diplomat accuses Lawrence of telling half-lies. “A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth,” this character say. “But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”

(Source: NY Times)