By Monica Showalter(American Thinker)
For leftist failures like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, nothing trumps Getting Trump.
So it must have seemed natural to him to shut down two big skating rinks in New York City on the grounds that they were managed by the Trump Organization with 250 employees.
According to Deadline:
“New York City doesn’t do business with insurrectionists,” de Blasio tweeted. “We’re taking steps to TERMINATE agreements with the Trump Organization to operate the Central Park Carousel, Wollman and Lasker skating rinks, and the Ferry Point Golf Course” in the Bronx.
While city officials have explored ways to exit the agreements since 2015, de Blasio said in an interview with MSNBC that last Wednesday’s deadly and destructive invasion of the U.S. Capitol left no other option. “The city of New York will no longer have anything to do with the Trump Organization,” he said. He added that he sees the city as standing on “strong legal ground,” should Trump decide to file suit.
Turns out he had another option, and after hearing from angry New Yorkers, he skedaddled as fast as he could to take it.
According to the New York Post:
City Hall on Sunday reversed Mayor de Blasio’s move to shutter Lasker and Wollman rinks in Central Park six weeks ahead of their typical April closing dates — in an effort to freeze-out his political rival.
“New York City kids deserve all the time on the ice they can get this year. The Wollman and Lasker rinks will stay open under current management for the few weeks left in this season,” City Hall Press Secretary Bill Neidhardt told The Post.
It was the stupidest, most disgusting shutdown since Jimmy Carter pulled America out of the 1980 Olympics to protest the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
It was also a very leftist thing to do. Leftist consider the needs of people last in their political calculations, and this idiocy is no exception.
Did de Blasio care about the kids, particularly minority kids who can’t get out of that miserable city like the rich ones do, the kids who use that rink in the last godawful days of New York’s miserable winters? I’ve lived in that city, I know what it’s like around the tail end of February just in normal times with the filthy snow, the grim, ugly winter coats, the icy freezing rain, and the non-stop cold. For New Yorkers around this time, spring can’t come fast enough.
One of the teeny, tiny diversions in that city is the sweet availability of the inexpensive Central Park skating rinks, which can rent skates for a nominal cost to anyone, let them skate away, and give them happy diversion they don’t have to go to the Hamptons to get.
They are there, and they were made that way by the Trump Organization, which rescued the Wollman rink from socialist-hellhole dilapidation way back in 1986 and made them something authentic and reliable for New Yorkers to enjoy. For a lot of people, that kind of competence is what won Trump his 2016 election. Thomas Lifson tells me that the best chapter in Trump’s famous book, “The Art of the Deal” was on how Trump rescued the Wollman rink from being a dilapidated dysfunctional dump from the clowns then running New York City, and how made it into something nice for New Yorkers, raising their quality of life.
Eric Trump, Trump’s son who along with his brother runs the Trump Organization, pointed out that handicapped kids in skating programs to help them got shut out by this idiocy, for one.
Professional skaters who must use the rink to keep training got hit too, and complained mightily.
Worst hit of all were the minority kids, the kids suffering horribly based on teachers’ unions refusing to open schools for months and months, leaving them unable to see their friends, unable to make new friends, isolated from all human contact, and many now anxious, depressed and even committing suicide. The New York City skating rink, with its wide open-air spaces was one of the few places they could go with little fear of catching COVID, and just a cheap or free subway ride away, and for some, walking distance.
De Blasio’s contract cancellation was amazingly spiteful, given that it normally ran out in April, meaning, these last horrible weeks of the New York winter would have no skating at all for the kids.
All to Get Trump.
It’s notable that de Blasio is a notoriously unpopular mayor whose lockdowns have cut the quality of life in New York to pretty much zero. A third of its restaurants are gone and many are not re-opening on fears that they could be shut down again. Gyms, organized sports, theatre, every possible recreation with a social component is gone in New York with the city easily a model for the Living in a Ghost Town that Mick Jagger sang about.
De Blasio these days is cheering the coming downfall of Andrew “Ozymandias” Cuomo, his bitter leftist rival in the governor’s office. But he’s managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with this idiotic move. Now he’s backtracking. He’s heard from angry New Yorkers, apparently a lot of them and trying to fix it with just a little bit of egg on his face.
That’s a tall order, given that the early West Side Rag reporting had De Blasio minions saying they were busy as beavers working to find replacement contractors or investors from the decades-long Trump management of the rink to replace the Trump Organization. The shutdown and reversal suggest that they failed, and probably won’t now that business is fleeing the city and rich people are moving out. One New Yorker asked if Michael Bloomberg can come to the rescue for the rinks? Hey Mike? (Bloomberg has a special cold spot for the poor, so don’t make any bets). Maybe the city can run it …. like it was run in 1986 before Trump came to the rescue. Meanwhile, de Blasio’s city coffers are looking a little bankrupt these days, particularly the subway, but many others, too. De Blasio’s just waiting with his fingers crossed for Joe Biden’s stimulus to bail him out.
Let’s hope this stupidity directed against the kids of New York takes him down alongside Cuomo. Stupid, cruel acts like these in the name of Getting Trump are perfect reasons to thrown such bounders out.
