Blue on Blue: NBC's Al Roker Lashes Out at Bill de Blasio

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“‘It was exactly what we predicted!’ Al Roker lashes out at de Blasio’s ‘class war’ snow failures after the new mayor claims storm was a surprise and then DEFENDS response,” the London Daily Mail reports.

“Today Show weatherman Al Roker tore into Bill de Blasio’s response to the snowstorm which caused traffic chaos across the Big Apple — after the New York Mayor claimed the city was caught by surprise,” the Daily Mail adds:

Roker said that he feared that de Blasio, who has only been in office less than a month, had made a huge mistake by not being on top of their response to the storm.

He then made an ominous reference to former New York Mayor John Lindsay, who never shook off his reaction to the February 1969 nor’easter which left 14 people dead and 68 injured.

Lindsay was seen to only care about how the snow plows dealt with Manhattan and when he visited Queens a week after the storm — was told, ‘Get away, you bum’, by a resident disgusted he had the gall to visit when there was still snow on the ground.

“There is a rich history of people in leadership positions dealing with weather crisis,” the article goes on to quote de Blasio as saying. “My attitude is to lead from the front and to be out leading from the front.”

Leading from the front? He’ll never get the Democrat nomination for president that way.

The Daily Mail notes, “de Blasio was accused of a class war against the rich of Manhattan for not voting for him after residents claimed the streets of the affluent Upper East Side were not plowed for snow:”

Admitting that if there was any part of the Upper East Side that needed snow relief, de Blasio said he would be there ‘right away’ — although that failed to answer the gathered reporters questions of why the area was not serviced the day or evening before.

The answer is quite simple, actually. Back in early 2011, when New York City was hip deep in a foot and a half or more of white powdery global warming and snow removal was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, Victor Davis Hanson coined “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”

It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.

The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.

Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.

Insert obligatory “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” Mencken quote here. And Bill de Bane (as Jonah Goldberg dubbed him) is just the man to give it to Gothamites, who forgot what the city was like prior to Rudy Giuliani’s massive CTL-ALT-DLT reboot of its government’s hidebound Lindsay-era leftwing groupthink.

Related: Of course, de Blasio is far from the only punitive Democrat in New York State; Michelle Malkin dubs Andrew Cuomo the “Shove Guv.”

Coupled with the president, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, both New York politicians are yet another reminder, as Troy Senik wrote at Ricochet in October, “Populism’s Hard When You Don’t Like the People.”

Update: