#De Blasio whistles while NYC burns: Goodwin

During the Vietnam War, American military officials put such an outlandishly positive spin on events that the press corps took to calling the afternoon briefings the “5 o’clock follies.”

To judge from the fantasies he’s been spinning, Mayor de Blasio has adopted equally bad habits. He wouldn’t know the truth if it fell on his head.

His press conference Tuesday was a howler of false claims and pie-in-the-sky promises. His declaration of victory over virtually everything that ails mankind would be laughable if the reality weren’t so grim.

With a straight face, de Blasio claimed that during the coronavirus, New Yorkers “came together, found a way forward, created something out of nothing, found solutions we didn’t even know we had. And that’s how we’ve gotten to the point we’re at now.”

What city is he talking about? People are fleeing, businesses are dying, jobs are vanishing, crime is surging and talk of a financial crisis can’t be ignored. If this is success, what would failure look like?

Yet he prattles on about an imaginary path to a glorious future, saying the goal is not to “recreate a status quo that wasn’t good enough, but to go farther to see that this city can do even better in the future. And that’s what we will do.”

Good grief. Any poll would find the city nearly unanimous in willing to go back to the status quo of 10 months ago. That city wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than now in terms of jobs, public safety and quality of life.

At moments like these, it’s tempting to ignore de Blasio because he’s term limited and once the new year begins, attention will focus on the race to succeed him.

But he shouldn’t be ignored. A new mayor won’t take over until January of 2022, meaning the Putz has more than 13 months to do more damage. Every dollar he wastes and every decision he makes will limit the flexibility of a new mayor.

Consider de Blasio’s comments Tuesday about two key topics — schools and mental health. The common denominator is that he has spectacularly failed in both areas, which just happen to be vital to the very people he promised to help.

Amid parent anger about the paucity of actual learning in the schools and the relentless push to dumb down standards when not actually erasing them altogether, the mayor had the gall to claim that the city’s educrats are the best in America.

“Let’s look at our Department of Education where they had to create in the middle of a crisis, whole new approaches, remote learning, a whole new approach to in-person education that now has become the gold standard of the nation,” he insisted.

This is not just happy talk. This is an outright lie, a fabrication of a situation where attendance, home work assignments and overall achievement have been thrown over board in a bid to keep the unions happy and parents in the dark.

On mental health, his language was similarly detached from reality. While pledging to “fundamentally change the approach to mental health emergencies,” he turned to his wife, Chirlane McCray. The hype machine was cranked to the max as he called her “someone who has really changed the conversation profoundly and shown us what is possible when it comes to treating mental illness and reaching all New Yorkers.”

In the real world, McCray spent more than $1 billion on a program that achieved results too tiny to be measured and too expensive to be replicated. In the process, she fumbled away her prospective political career and, thankfully, declared she would not run for Brooklyn Borough President next year.

Her new job is to create mental health teams that will respond, with police as backup, to 911 calls, starting next year in two neighborhoods. But asked by a reporter which neighborhoods, McCray answered: “We have a planning process in place and the neighborhoods will be determined over the course of the next couple of months.”

In plain English, don’t hold your breath.

There was one further insight into the underbelly of national politics. Asked if he would advise store owners who boarded up their stores before the election to remove the plywood coverings, the mayor inadvertently conceded that the threat of violence came from the left and was over because of the results.

Citing Joe Biden’s likely victory, de Blasio said, “I think the worst is past, I think it’s time for us to move forward.”

No such luck for New York as a whole. The worst will be past only when de Blasio vacates City Hall.

Of course there’s already a Dem civil war

That didn’t take long.

The civil war in the Democratic Party that was put aside in a united effort to defeat President Trump is getting hot even before election results are final.

Take note, grieving and furious Trump supporters. While not a consolation, it is an informative distraction that the prospect of victory is not producing much joy on the other side.

In fact, the looming showdown is shaping up to be every bit as vicious as the general election. Each side is probably making its own enemies lists.

“The Democratic Truce is Over” declared a Tuesday headline in the Atlantic, with author Elaine Godfrey describing power grabs where Biden comes off as a figure head.

The disputes are shaped in large part by the blue wave that didn’t happen, leaving a tough landscape in congress. Dems will hold a very small House majority and the GOP likely retains Senate control, meaning much of Biden’s agenda will be whittled down or killed.

That, of course, will make the combatants nastier to each other, which recalls a great LBJ story, as told by Joseph Califano Jr.

In his book, “The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson,” Califano writes that the president was frustrated by the refusal of liberals to back his plans. Talking to Oval Office visitors one day, Johnson suddenly asked if they knew the difference between liberals and cannibals.

Getting silence, he declared, “Cannibals eat only their enemies.”

Cuomo’s gone round bend

Poor Gov. Cuomo. He’s suffering from an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Monday he bemoaned that a COVID vaccine was announced with Trump still in the White House, apparently willing to see more people die rather than have the president oversee distribution.

Tuesday he embarrassed himself again, telling Howard Stern he was so angry at Trump “that If I wasn’t governor of New York, I would have decked him. Period.”

The reason, he said, was that the president calls Chris Cuomo Fredo.

“I mean he was attacking me, he was attacking my family, he was anti-Italian,” the governor said.

Right, nothing demolishes the stereotypes in “The Godfather” like a threat of violence.

A lot of hot air

Block that metaphor.

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