Sophie’s Choice

I really didn’t want to write anymore about Bill De Blasio and you probably didn’t want to read or hear anything more about him either. 

But what he just did was so incredibly self-serving and dangerous, I cannot stay silent.

Billy boy is running for Congress in the newly redrawn 10th CD that includes the East and West Village, the Lower East Side, parts of downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights and Borough Park.  

His major opponents in the August primary include Democrat Socialist Congressman Mondaire Jones, Working Families Party Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou and Nydia Velazquez supported City Council member Carlina Rivera.  Also running is octogenarian Liz Holtzman, remember her?

The first three candidates are way more to the left than De Blaz. So what’s an out-of-work former mayor, a so-called proud progressive who honeymooned in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas, to do?  Trump up a reason to grab a cheap headline to show he’s really really progressive. And how does he do that?  Easy peasy!  Pick on Israel!

We know what progressives think of Israel, that apartheid, oozing infection of a state that needs to be eradicated for the good of mankind.  They hate Israel, so De Blasio tried to claw his way back into their good graces by making a loud statement that he no longer supported AIPAC, the group that lobbies on behalf of Israel. And of course he pompously declared he wouldn’t accept AIPAC’s endorsement if it was offered to him. As if!

What’s his excuse for the sudden trashing of AIPAC?  He says they dissed his pal Nina Turner, a progressive House candidate in Cleveland who lost a primary to Shontel Brown who was supported by AIPAC and other groups.  

Funny, De Blasio spoke before the AIPAC convention as recently as 2019, but now he says AIPAC has changed and he used his favorite overused and impotent word saying their support for Brown was “unacceptable”.

Bill, here’s the thing, you fraud.  Your friend Turner lost fair and square and decisively to Shontel Brown.  The Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Brown over Turner, a future Squad member.  

New York Congressman Ritchie Torres campaigned for Brown and said of De Blasio’s AIPAC declaration, “I find it striking that he would lament the defeat of Nina Turner and, by implication, the victory of Shontel Brown.  He is doing himself no favors by implicitly denigrating a well-regarded member of the House Democratic Caucus, a CBC member for whom the majority and the caucus chair campaigned in person.”

The clear-thinking Torres hit the De Blasio right on the head.  He said, “His change of heart seems prompted by the hard left sweepstakes that has become increasingly characteristic of competitive primaries in New York City.”

So true, so true Congressman Torres.  

Here’s the bottom line.  De Blasio is in a panic.  He was the most hated Mayor in the history of New York City.  He’s a professional, career politician desperately in need of a job.  If he loses this race he’s through, done, finito.  None of the bigwig progressives are backing him and he needed to raise his leftist cred with the woke crowd.

But what he did in fabricating the flimsiest of excuses to lurch left is disgraceful, not only for the act itself, but also for the disgustingly cynical and borderline anti-semitic move to use AIPAC as the whipping boy. 

De Blasio, how dare you play the Israel card?  Out of one side of your mouth you say you support the Jewish State, yada yada yada, and from the other side you use the rampant anti-Israel sentiment amongst the left-wing of the Democratic Party for your own crass political gain.

But that’s all part of De Blasio’s cynical calculation.  His main rivals are way off the centrist path so he figures the voters in the middle will hang with him not out of love but out of necessity.

But he did it in the worst way possible.  He did it by aligning himself with the J-Street and BDS crowd.

De Blasio is a sucker-puncher, a back-stabber and he is untrustworthy.  He is a duplicitous, self-aggrandizing incompetent.  He is a lowlife.

Now, the Israel-supporting voters in the 10th CD who rightly fear the progressive left, have a real problem.  Unless they think Liz Holtzman has a shot at winning, they are stuck with the “Squaders” or with dastardly De Blasio. 

If that isn’t a Sophie’s choice then I don’t know what is.