When’s the last time someone heard a New York mayor complain about inattention from the city’s tabloid newspapers?
That would be, like, never — right?
Yet here we have Eric Adams, up to his ears in budget-busting border-hoppers, moaning that the tabs aren’t paying close enough attention.
“Our shelter system has doubled in size, [and] it’s no longer on the front pages of our daily tabloids,” he says. “We are dealing with a silent crisis.”
Not on the front pages? Silent crisis?
OK, so maybe he doesn’t actually read the tabs — a character flaw, but not a mortal sin.
So maybe he hasn’t seen the column-inches — make that column-miles — of “crisis” coverage.
So let’s pile it on. If hizzoner really wants a little tabloid love, how about this: “HAPLESS MAYOR / IN HOPELESS BIND”
The pickle is not entirely of Adam’s making — Hello, President Joe Biden! — though it’s close enough for government work: Between the mayor’s knee-jerk sanctuary-city babbling and his deaf-dumb-and-blind acquiescence in the damage Washington is doing to his city, he’s clearly a co-conspirator.
Because let’s face it: “If they come, we will build it” — the Adams approach — isn’t a policy. It’s a surrender, and a cowardly way out at that.
They keep coming — about 2,500 border-crossers a week, or north of 87,000 so far.
And Adams keeps building — at least 186 shelters at last count, with new ones added seemingly every day. There is no end in sight.
The cost? Don’t ask. (OK, approaching $4 billion, with no end in sight to that, either.)
Yet in Adamsland, it’s all the product of soft-peddling by the New York Post (with maybe a little help from that other paper)?
This is bizarre, akin to Adams dubbing intake shelters “welcome centers,” and then acting surprised when the border-hoppers take him at his word.
It makes no sense.
It’s also inconceivable that earlier Big Apple mayors would have stood quietly by as Washington pushed policies certain to destabilize the city’s finances and threaten its ability to deliver essential services.
(Well, the grown-up mayors anyway, which definitionally excludes Bill de Blasio.)
How hard is it to imagine Mike Bloomberg letting Brooklyn boy Chuck Schumer get away unbruised after refusing for months to help stem the “migrant” tide? Very hard indeed.
How easy is it to picture Rudy Giuliani plunking a disruptive “welcome center” down in the Brooklyn district of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries? Except it wouldn’t be called a “welcome center.”
As for Ed Koch — well, let’s just say that his punishments would fit their crimes; any New York politician who refused to stand up for the city’s interests would regret it, sooner or later.
And what would each of the trio have had to say to the silent-as-a-sphinx Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand as she stood on the brink of a re-election year?
Probably something close to what they’d say about Gov. Kathy Hochul’s own milquetoast approach to Washington’s transgressions; they’re gentlemen, so there’s that, but it would be pointed and not very pretty.
Yet here we have Eric Adams, unable to say anything of any consequence to, or about, anyone in a position to help a city that needs a lot of it right now.
Isn’t it funny how a fellow who can lash out at an elderly Holocaust survivor who asks an impudent question wilts before people with real power?
Sure, he sniped at Hochul on Tuesday — implying insufficient help from the state.
“When the [weekend] storm hit upstate, they called New York City, [which] has always been there for the entire state,” he said. Now “the storm of migrants has hit us . . .” and Albany needs to reciprocate.
It’s a fair point, even if it is pretty weak tea. And it certainly fails to appreciate the difference between an epic natural disaster and a thoroughly botched federal immigration policy.
One was an act of God, the other of Joe Biden.
What a blessing if Eric Adams could bring himself to say so.
Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc
This story originally appeared on NYPost
