What's wrong with New York?

 

I remember LaGuardia taking a sledgehammer to slot machines.  (All right, I don't remember it but I remember reading about it.  I remember this picture.)  I remember the strikes and riots of what John Lindsay called "Fun City."  I remember Ed Koch picking a fight with Moonachie, New Jersey, just because he thought the name was silly.  (Supposedly it commemorates an Iroquois leader named Monaghie.)  I remember the racist atrocities of the Giuliani years and Bill DeBlasio eating pizza with a knife and fork.  Wipe the slate, we have a new Goofy Mayor No 1.  Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Adams.

Last year we found out Hizzoner (as the tabloids wittily call them) wears magic bracelets which he thinks connect him to quartz and labradorite under Manhattan and give him "special energy."  OK, lots of people believe in crystals and stuff.  A harmless fashion choice, right?  It's not like his wife/domestic partner's astrologer is setting policy.  

Yesterday he hosted the annual interfaith breakfast and embarrassment, and the wheels definitely came off.  "A priest, an imam and a rabbi walk into City Hall" should be the opening of a joke and no more, especially in a city as big and diverse as New York, but politicians think they need to pay lip service to the religion industry or alienate the more primitive voters.  Adams paid a lot more -- he's overdrawn now.

First a chaplain introduced him as "one of the chosen."  He took it from there.

"Don't tell me about no separation of church and state.  State is the body.  Church is the heart.  You take the heart out of the body, the body dies."   He went on to blame school shootings on the Supreme Court-mandated end to compulsory school prayer in 1962.  As a former cop he knows how easy it was to get a gun even before the present Court ruled "Give everybody handgun!" last year.  And now he knows about the separation of church and state because Donna Lieberman of the NYCLU directed him to the First Amendment of the Constitution he has repeatedly sworn to uphold.

I thought Adams might make a better mayor than his opponent, unhinged vigilante leader Curtis Sliwa.  We all make mistakes.