A feud awakening
P OOR Mayor de Blasio. Maybe the cold weather is getting to him — or maybe it’s the heat from prosecutors. Either way, he seems to have lost his final bearings.
His public attacks on both President-elect Donald Trump for daring to win the election and on the Republican Congress for not reimbursing the city for Trump’s full security costs make pithy sound bites — but are the epitome of foolishness.
Why, pray tell, would Trump go the extra mile to help the city when the mayor is braying like a jackass and routinely denouncing him? And where did de Blasio get the dopey idea that attacking Congress would lead members to open the federal purse?
“That is not helpful,” Staten Island Rep. Dan Donovan, the only House Republican from the five boroughs, said of the mayor. “That does not help my advocacy for the city.”
Donovan was able to get $7 million of the $35 million de Blasio asked for, but the mayor’s mouth is putting any more at risk. “You can bet if members in Congress are bashed for what they
did wrong, they may very well say, ‘OK, you won’t get any funding,’” Donovan told The Post.
As Pete King, a Long Island House Republican, put it, “It’s one thing to fight for what you believe in, but you don’t get your way by threatening Congress to give you money.”
That insight should be elementary for any adult, but de Blasio still doesn’t get it. Now in his third year at City Hall, all with Republicans controlling the House, he acts as if his wish is their command.
But getting money is one thing; keeping New York safe from terterrorism is quite another. And at a time when murderous Islamists are wreaking death and destruction in Europe and with New York always a target, de Blasio’s latest feud with Gov. Cuomo veers from the realm of the foolish to the dangerous.
Cuomo has put 100 State Police troopers in the city, and plans to add 150 more — which infuriates the mayor. He accused Cuomo of butting in where he’s not needed, and told him to butt out. “I assume, and we all believe, certainly [NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill] believes, there’s a division of labor where the State Police work all around the state, including on MTA facilities, for example, owned by the state. Great. And let the NYPD do what it does best,” de Blasio said in a NY1 interview. There is madness behind what he is saying: On the very day that a Turkish cop assassinates the Russian ambassador and a stolen truck plows into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people in a terror attack, de Blasio objected to having more cops patrolling New York. Some would be assigned to potential terror hot spots that Cuomo reportedly believes are underprotected such as East Side bridges and tunnels. The city already is on high alert because of the potential for copycat attacks against soft targets, especially over the Christmas and New Year holidays. In the age of terror, you can never have too much trained protection.
The mayor’s objections make zero sense. He should be embracing more cops wherever he can get them, instead of engaging in a childish turf battle.
That’s not to deny that Cuomo has a knife out for de Blasio, and that he had to know the added troopers would irk City Hall. It is an aspect of their running feud that the two former friends have not discussed the issue or most of the other areas of contention.
But Cuomo’s aggressiveness is no excuse for de Blasio to put himhimselfself ahead of public safety. By fighting Trump, Congress and Cuomo, he is making his politicapolitical ambition and wounded pride more important than his responsi-responsibilities as mayor.
There’s an old saying that “good government is good politics.” But it’s also true that bad government is bad politics, and de Blasio is not helping himself by putting the city at odds with both the federal and state governments. His arrogant refusal to work with anyone who doesn’t share his socialist-style politics is a risk New York can’t afford.