So long, Bill de Blasio! New York may have been a tale of two cities when you arrived, but not anymore. Now it’s just one city, a city defined by our loathing of Bill de Blasio.
As New York City selects our next mayor, Billy Bolshevik is officially a lame duck. Farewell to the lumbering lummox of the loony left. Auf Wiedersehen, Warren Wilhelm. Das Vidaniya, Dingleberry.
It’s a fractious city that can’t even agree on simple things like which Ray’s Pizza to go to, or whether you should wear your mask for that first 15 seconds after you enter the restaurant. Yet Bill de Blasio united us in a way no one could have foreseen. Everyone hates the guy. Left, right, whatever: there is no easier way to get people chattering at a party than, “Bill de Blasio. Am I right?”
I’ve heard people engage in hour-long disquisitions about whether he’s more of a dirtbag, a dillweed, or a dingbat. If he has a defender who isn’t on his payroll, I’ve never met him. When he ran for president, he was the first candidate in the history of Gallup polling to register the same number as Juneau’s average temperature in January: negative four.
After 20 years of competent governance, de Blasio cast his gaze over the cityscape and said, “That’s gotta change.” Mission accomplished!
De Bozo began small but ramped up quickly; at first he was only murdering our groundhogs, but soon he moved up to insulting our cops. When police literally turned their back on him; they spoke for all of us.
Not since John “Fun City” Lindsay, the prototypical limousine liberal, has a mayor been as despised as Bill de Blasio, the lazy, corrupt, stupid, incompetent spendthrift who played Wreck-It-Ralph with what used to be America’s capital of aspiration, the center of it all. Bill is spending 34 percent more (in inflation-adjusted terms) than the city did before he got here. Does anything look 34 percent better? Maybe if you’re the rat I stepped on on Sixth Avenue while getting into a cab this summer. Fun City became Ratopolis.
There’s a 1990s movie by Paul “Taxi Driver” Schrader called “Light Sleeper” that takes place during a garbage strike, and it’s quaint today because Schrader’s nightmare conception of the city at its worst is how it looks . . . every night in 2021.
After a massive infusion of federal money, the street sweepers are still operating at half the frequency they used to. Every garbage can in the city looks like it hasn’t been emptied since Eli Manning retired.
Every morning I exit the 50th Street stop on the downtown 1 train at 7:30 and pick my feet carefully through the results of what happens when you leave what amounts to an open-air toilet for the armies of the homeless to whom Daddy de Blasio has opened his arms. Last month I steered my daughter around a large pile of human poop there.
De Blasio famously ordered city work crews to waste time and money trolling Donald Trump painting and repainting the street in front of Trump Tower, where he hasn’t even lived for five years, but when it came to his own towers he didn’t know what to do with them. The city housing authority became such a disaster under De Blasio that a judge ordered it turned over to . . . the Trump Administration. Real Estate Mogul 1, Mr. “Affordable Housing” zero.
On his way out of City Hall, like Joker walking away from the exploding hospital, Bill the Butcher sought to blow up one of the few things in the city that actually works, the gifted-and-talented program that is like an island in a sea of despair for thousands of public-school students whose parents are currently scanning the real-estate listings in Montclair and Ridgewood.
If Comrade Schmuck gets any bouquets on his way out, they’re probably going to come from the gangs that now run parts of Rikers Island.
Non New Yorkers often ask, “How did this guy everybody hates get to be mayor anyway?” The answer is so stupid no one believes it, but here it is: Because people liked de Blasio’s son. That’s all it is.
De Blasio was floundering in the polls like a T. Rex trying to reach for a high shelf when he cut a TV ad in which then-15-year-old Dante de Blasio sincerely explained what it was like to be black and young in this town. The actual black candidate in the race, a non-crazy Democrat named Bill Thompson, refused to denounce stop-and-frisk when the city was purring along so well that that was the only thing Democrats were worried about; de Blasio used his likable son to show why he was against it, and the tiny quotient of lefties who vote in Democratic primaries swooned. In a one-party town, de Blasio coasted to reelection even though nobody can stand him.
So how does Billy de Blundero spend his final hours before the next mayor is known? The same way he came into office: drafting behind his son’s star power and looking over all of our heads to whatever fantasy he is dreaming about on all those mornings when he oversleeps. Using taxpayer dollars, de Blasio hired Dante’s Yale pal James Nydam to make an online video celebrating his awesomeness in a pathetic bid to spend our money injecting life into his dead fish of a gubernatorial campaign.
Dante served as a volunteer on the project, and we can only hope the young man’s filmmaking career turns out better than de Blasio’s wife’s career blowing a billion dollars of public funds on a mental-health boondoggle meant to build her profile.
Unlike virtually every previous mayor, Bill d’Oblivious was never even interested in the mechanics of the city in the first place: as the city visibly reverted to the Snake Plissken standard before everyone’s eyes, Bill kept yammering on about abstractions that have zilch to do with municipal management — global warming, hate, inequality. Whenever he railed against capitalism — whose world capital this city was, is, and will remain — he sounded as silly as the Sandinista summer-camp doofus he has always been, a middle-aged man whose mental age is “sophomore.” Capitalism pays for the ginormous welfare state that has jacked up the city budget to a level comparable to what is spent by the entire state of Florida.
Our soon-to-be-ex mayor was as prepared for our real and growing problems as Barney the Big Purple Dinosaur minus the sweetness. If Gotham does rebound, as it has many times before, it’ll be no thanks to the smug simpleton who departs on New Year’s Day.
No higher office is clamoring for your leadership, Bill. You’re so useless even CNN won’t hire you. Get ready for what your communist buddies used to call for the dustbin of history. Adios, jackass.
