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By Andrea Peyser
May 18, 2015
The chaos of a de Blasio presidency
I see a future of sky-high taxes and very tall ceilings. Of a chicken in every pot and a pot plant in every planter.
Fat cats would be incarcerated en masse for the criminal possession of money. And thugs who shoot, maim and steal would be reclassified as victims of wage inequality, in need of high-paying jobs, welfare benefits, affordable housing, therapy, hugs or deep-tissue massages.
Cops would replace their badges and aggressive blue uniforms with soothing earth-tone windbreakers and espadrilles, and trade in their guns for thick-skinned yellow fruit.
Bananas don’t kill people. People kill people.
And with burger-flippers taking home a minimum hourly wage of $125, McDonald’s would go out of business. Young people who rely on minimum-wage jobs for a toehold in the workforce would be flung into unemployment lines and onto the streets. No worries. In the new world order, drug-selling would be decriminalized, registered as taxable small businesses in a society in which alarm clocks would cease to be manufactured.
These fantasies are closer to reality than one might think. This could be a rough sketch of the United States of Amerika under the notoriously oversleeping President Bill de Blasio and his hands-on first lady and co-president, Chirlane McCray.
The vice president? Al Sharpton.
The attorney general? Rachel Noerdlinger, McCray’s former chief- of-staff, who bashed the media — which would be outlawed as propaganda is fed directly from the government to the public — for daring to report that she lives with a cop-bashing felon boyfriend and that her teen son was busted for trespassing in a known drug-buying location.
The mayor whose mayoralty’s greatest hit was punishing possessors of small amounts of marijuana not with arrests but summonses has just come home from Bill’s Excellent Adventure. As murders and shootings rise in the city, Hizzoner has hopscotched around the country this spring to preach his vision for a progressive nation — progressivism being a leftist’s term for government encroachment into every nook and cranny of citizens’ lives.
As Post columnist Fredric U. Dicker reported last month, despite denials, de Blasio is positioning himself to be the far-left alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to a national party operative.
Can he succeed?
“He spent his honeymoon in Havana. If Hillary falters, he’s seen as a champion of the American left,” a political insider told me.
Political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who advises mostly Democrats but has worked for a few Republicans, told me, “He’s trying to set himself up as the sole gatekeeper and definer of what is progressive and who is progressive. On issues of police conduct, affordable housing and income inequality, he appears to be on the right side of history. [The left side?]
“But is America ready for new redistribution of the wealth?” Sheinkopf asked. “I really have some deep qualms about that.”
Is this country ready for President de Blasio?
Well, I need a vacation. I suppose receiving generous government handouts beats working for a living.
At least, before the United States of de Blasio goes broke.