There are major tragedies to this story, but here’s a minor one to chew on: Because it happened in NYC, nothing much will change because of it. If this were New Jersey, Christie would turn it into an object lesson in how far public employee unions are willing to go to play hardball over money. As it is, neither Cuomo nor Mayor Nolabels will do any more than is necessary to reassure an angry public that they’re on the case. On the contrary, given past practices, we should be grateful that Bloomy’s not sneering at New Yorkers for being ingrates.
But when a mayoralty comes to be defined by fanciful notions — political labels, bike paths, french fries and other irrelevancies — forgiveness following catastrophe will be a long time coming.
Especially when the mayor’s reaction to the debacle ranges from surly condescension to bewildered resentment to transparently feigned contrition…
Bloomberg should fire John Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, but he won’t — just as he refused to fire Nick Scopetta as fire commissioner after gross management failures at the FDNY conspired to kill two firefighters at the old Deutsche Bank building three years ago.
In Mike’s World, a fired commissioner would be a public confession that the mayor himself has failed. But last week’s mess owns Mike Bloomberg. The label “failure” is stamped squarely in the middle of his forehead. The fact that Manhattan bike lanes had been hand shoveled clear to the pavement before a lot of outerborough avenues had seen their first plow demonstrates yet again that Bloomberg has lost interest in core mayoral duties — as if more evidence is necessary.
In case you missed it over the weekend, while the Post was running stories about how sanitation targeted wealthy neighborhoods to send a statement to the local powers that be and how some supervisors were caught drinking on the job while buses idled in the snow blocks away, Bloomberg was busy calling it … a character-building experience. And thus did America’s first third-party president launch his successful bid to capture the White House, my friends.
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