I’m sure you’ve all heard about the major, end of the world power outage that hit New York City over the weekend. Everyone has been talking about it and it’s eating up a ton of the news cycle on CNN today. (For some reason.) In any event, it was some unfortunate timing for Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio, because when the lights went out and traffic ground to a halt he was in Iowa continuing his bizarre quest for the Democrats’ presidential nomination. That was apparently the last straw for the New York Post, who came out and called for Hizzoner to quit his job or be removed if he’s no longer interested in doing it.

The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.

Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.

And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.

The fact that Bill de Blasio has been something of a failure as Mayor is neither new information nor a secret, and the Post has done tremendous work over the years documenting his many shortcomings. Whether it was wasteful programs that burned through cash while producing few (if any) results or the stench of corruption surrounding City Hall, there’s been plenty to complain about.

But with all that said, I do have to question why this particular event should be the one to trigger de Blasio’s departure. Yes, he was in Iowa when a “crisis” struck and that makes for bad political optics. But in all honesty, what was he going to do if he was at City Hall when the power went off? Go out and start repairing transformers? The most he would likely do is have somebody put in a call to the utility company and get an estimate as to when they would have it fixed.

Also, the argument has been made before this (sometimes by the New York Post, in fact) that the city actually runs just fine without him. In fact, it might even run better when he’s not around.

The bigger question for me is why this blackout was being treated like such a huge deal. I mean, if it had been the result of sabotage or a terrorist attack, it would certainly be news. But the power company just described it as an equipment failure. I put this question forward on Twitter earlier today.

You know, we've had plenty of power outages where I live that have lasted for several hours and nobody calls for a Congressional investigation. Why is this NYC story such a big deal?

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) July 15, 2019

This is one of the more amusing and interesting responses I received.

https://twitter.com/Dugan8498/status/1150773187380015105

Seriously, people. It’s a blackout. We had one here on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago that lasted hours in the middle of a workday. Yes, it was an inconvenience, but the world didn’t end. Not everything that happens in the Big Apple is Big News. I mean, if there’s another sighting of Pizza Rat, I could see making a fuss over it. But this was just a blackout.