Pinstriped sage Yogi Berra has been credited with the observation that “you can learn a lot by watching.” Alas, such wisdom is wasted on Mayor Putz.
Asked why he wasn’t at the unveiling of the glitzy plan for LaGuardia Airport with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Vice President Joe Biden and other officials, the mayor offered a revealing response: He only goes to events where he’s invited to speak.
OK, we get it. De Blasio’s war with Cuomo continues, and because the gov wouldn’t let him near the microphone, the mayor boycotted the event rather than fume in silence.
I think we know what Yogi would advise in such situations: “Grow up!”
In the middle of his second year, de?Blasio has hit a wall. Trapped in a far-left ideological swamp, he can’t bring himself to put his duty to the city ahead of his narrow-minded petulance. He doesn’t even seem to be trying.
He’s feuding with just about everybody in the city and Albany, even liberal allies like Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Comptroller Scott Stringer. While harmony can be overrated and disputes necessary, de?Blasio’s battles are more about attitude than substance.
Putzie fancies himself a national political figure, and will travel across the country to give a middling speech. He’s missing in action here too often, yet still acts as if winning the election was a blank check and that when he speaks, the waves should part.
When they don’t, he throws a fit. His hot-headed outburst after Cuomo and the Legislature failed to give him everything he wanted could be a textbook case on how not to get anything done. Against that backdrop, his refusal to go to the LaGuardia announcement is ominous. The $4 billion plan to raze dilapidated terminals and build new ones is a vital undertaking for the whole region’s future, especially the city’s.
The planning, cost and logistics are daunting, with an AirTrain link and a new subway stop envisioned.
The project will create tens of thousands of jobs and will reshape the city’s image, for better or worse, yet de Blasio pouts from afar because he wasn’t invited to speak.
Wrack your brain, but you can’t name another mayor who would have behaved that way.
Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg — they would have been there to toot the city’s horn and their own.
By the way, none of those mayors had easy relations with the governors of their time. But they sucked it up because they were adults about the job.
That’s an alien idea to the current occupant of City Hall. We saw his childish streak last year with his admission that he had never visited the High Line. It opened as a public park in 2009, brings millions of tourists to the city and helped spark a real estate boom on Manhattan’s Far West Side, yet de?Blasio wouldn’t check it out.
Maybe it was “too Manhattan” for Brooklyn Bill. Or maybe it was a symbol of the Imperial City thinking of his predecessor.
Indeed, so much of de Blasio’s agenda still seems to focus on getting out from under the enormous shadow of the 20-year combined tenure of Giuliani and Bloomberg. He campaigned to change Gotham’s direction and, to his lasting discredit, approved an inauguration ceremony that featured sickening race-baiting attacks on Bloomberg, who sat in dignified, stony silence.
That was only the beginning. From policing to schools to funding parks to quality-of-life enforcement, de Blasio’s “reforms” are mostly a matter of undoing what his predecessors did. Instead of building on their successes, he gives the impression that he wants to make an entire era disappear so he can start from scratch.
That only works in Utopia. Here in the real world, it’s time for the mayor to pull on his big-boy pants and do his job.
Times and again, it’s GOP’s fault
The New York Times editorial page loves President Obama, but doesn’t like his new effort against Islamic State. Yet instead of saying so, it blames Congress for not stopping him. Damn Republicans!
The paper complains that the plan to create a buffer zone in Syria means “lawmakers appear resigned to allowing the Obama administration to slide ever more deeply into a complex war.”
Now imagine what that sentence would say if Democrats controlled Congress and a Republican sat in the White House.
Obama’s history lesson
Mike Huckabee is mixed up. The GOP presidential candidate got carried away denouncing the Iranian nuke deal and charged President Obama “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”
The Holocaust reference equates Obama with Hitler, and the president was right to call the remark “ridiculous.”
Huckabee’s mistake was to conflate evil with appeasement. He should have compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain, the British leader who convinced himself that “Herr Hitler” wanted to avoid war as much as he did.
After signing the Munich agreement with Hitler in September 1938, Chamberlain boasted that he had achieved “peace for our time.” He advised his countrymen to “go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”
That’s exactly what Obama is doing by trusting Iran, and that’s what Huckabee should have said.
When the Brits finally woke, they dumped Chamberlain and made Winston Churchill prime minister.
Does America have a Churchill waiting in the wings? After Obama, we desperately need one.
Truth about Hill is classified
The mailbag runneth over thanks to two inspectors general asking the Justice Department to investigate Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material on her private server.
Reader James Johnson wonders about Clinton’s claim that “I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received.”
“If that is true,” he writes, “what the hell was she doing for four years as secretary of state?”
Reader Sue Cyre is also incredulous at the claim:
“There must be thousands of classified emails. Almost everything the sec of state says or does is classified, even her daily schedule.”
James Barends writes that he had security clearance years ago, and suspects the White House knew Clinton was off the government grid.
“The Secret Service would have reported the installation of the server,” he writes.
“The lack of emails at State would have been a flag as well. The National Security Agency would have known and put monitoring software on the server.”
He believes Clinton was required, as he was, to authorize the government to monitor all her communications, and that electronic copies exist in the NSA’s database.
Finally, reader Robert Klein Engler sees a link between the email probe and Hillary’s upcoming testimony over the Benghazi terror attack.
“She has the goods on Obama and Obama has the goods on her,” he writes. “Who’s going to be the first to throw the other under the bus? If Hillary wants to be president, she’s got to run over Obama.
“I suspect she will do that.”