Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

Because the best way to take an embarrassing story and make it an embarrassing story that stretches out over several news cycles is to have your staff ask memorial organizers to postpone time:

“Rude.” “Disrespectful.” “Insulting.”

Those were words used by various voters to describe Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tardiness at Wednesday’s memorial ceremony for Flight 587.

On Thursday night, one of the victims’ family members told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer a new one — chutzpah.

“They asked us to delay the moment of silence to wait until the mayor got there,” [a family member] said.

It was an explosive charge about the mayor’s failure to show up on time for a memorial service commemorating the 13th anniversary of the crash of the American Airlines flight.

[The family member], who lost five family members in the crash, refused. She rang the bell starting the moment of silence at precisely 9:16 a.m., the exact moment of the crash.

“They kept telling us, ‘Wait, he’s coming. He’s coming,’ and I said, no, we’re not waiting. We’re not going to wait for him for a moment of silence. It happened at a certain time. That’s the time that we have to toll the bells,” [the family member] said.

In Other Words, What You Say On Your Boss’s Voicemail When You Call Out Sick

Somehow when he fesses up, it ends up sounding even worse:

A chronically tardy Mayor de Blasio infuriated the loved ones of American Airlines Flight 587 victims by arriving 20 minutes late for a memorial ceremony on Wednesday — and blaming it on a bad night’s sleep.

“I had a very rough night and woke up sluggish. And I should have gotten myself moving quicker,” he told reporters in the afternoon. “Just woke up in the middle of the night, couldn’t get back to sleep and felt really sluggish and off-kilter this morning.”

And the kicker (at 1:25):

“Mayor Bloomberg never would have done this. Mayor Bloomberg was always here on time.”

Hopefully he wasn’t up late gloating over how he essentially won a glorified primary back in 2013, because that really is a bad look . . .

In A Fog

You had one job, Mayor:

Habitually tardy Mayor Bill de Blasio arrived so late to the 13th anniversary ceremony of the crash of Flight 587 that he missed a bell ringing marking the exact time of the tragedy.

And in a bizarre twist, the mayor blamed being 20 minutes late on his boat being stuck in the dense fog that rolled over the city Wednesday morning.

“Mayor de Blasio traveled to the ceremony by boat this morning and the boat was delayed due to heavy fog,” a statement from the mayor’s office said. “The Mayor regrets missing the tolling of the bell, but was glad to have an opportunity to mark this solemn day with the families of those lost on Flight 587, who have the continued support of this administration.”

No word on whether any of the family members got a hug from the mayor . . .

It’s Big Thinking, That’s True, But Thinking Big Is What We New Yorkers Have Done Throughout Our History

When your mayoralty is one giant campaign, especially if it’s one giant campaign, then it’s not long before people start noticing the vapidity therein:

Politicians love ribbon-cutting ceremonies, so they cook up schemes for capital improvements like the 35-community-parks initiative. But New York City has nearly 2,000 parks, and their maintenance isn’t glamorous — it’s hard to summon the news media to show clean public toilets or pulled weeds — and the Parks Department sorely lacks enough full-time gardeners, plumbers and security guards.

That’s something that the mayor needs to address. Instead, he used the community parks announcement to score cheap political points, which critics rightly jumped on.

The mayor chastised his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, for favoring marquee parks and ignoring ones in underserved neighborhoods, prompting Veronica White, a former parks commissioner under Mr. Bloomberg, to note that the Bloomberg administration poured $5 billion in capital investments into parks, most of which were in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Mr. Bloomberg also added 850 acres of parkland to the five boroughs, she pointed out.

And it was Mr. Bloomberg who, before leaving office, set aside $80 million of the $130 million in Mayor de Blasio’s plan for those same neighborhood parks.

The Chris Christie Of New York City

No “Stronger Than The Storm” earworms yet, but there’s still a lot of mayoralty to go:

The mayor is meddling with the content produced by NYC TV, the city’s official television network, an insider told The Post, treating the taxpayer-funded station like a campaign arm and insisting it feature his friends.

[. . .]

“It’s all mayor,” said Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who wants other officials and professionals to have input. “Nobody pays any attention to this. There’s no real oversight. They can kind of do what they want.”

Bloomberg also used the programming to promote his leadership, but de Blasio treats it like a campaign ad, the source claimed.

“He milks it like crazy,” the insider said. “It seems like he’s still running.”