ERIC ADAMS BASKETBALL PLAYERS GET A FREE PASS?

You know how the Cleveland Browns inevitably implode every NFL season? Or how night follows day and then day follows night? Some things are such a given that you could put you could put your mortgage on it and hit a bar afterwards for a relaxing beer or two. Well, there’s a new stone-cold certainty in town. And that’s that failed human, let alone failed politician, NYC Mayor Eric Adams has an uncanny ability to continually screw up pretty much everything that he claps his eyes on. Like a reverse King Midas, everything he touches turns to crap rather than gold.

COVID-19 vaccine mandates are controversial things at the very best of times. Public heath versus individual liberty is a fine tightrope to teeter across, even for the most adept politician. Given that Adams has all the political tightrope ability of a drunken octopus, we end up with yet another King of Stop and Frisk mess to have to get our incredulous heads around. While Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for performers and the city’s sports teams just in time for regular play to resume, he also came up with the genius (and that’s genius with a huge side serving of irony) idea that city workers should continue to have to abide by the vaccine mandate, failing which there could be the very real risk that they could lose their job.

NYC is a lot of things, to a lot of people. However, at the core of the Big Apple’s philosophy is that everyone is on the same, even, playing field. Ridiculous discrepancies in wealth and status are the preserve of the likes of Trump, and we all know how much time NYC has for that particular New Yorker. Equality and giving every one a fair go are etched into the city’s DNA like nothing else comparable in the rest of the United States.

So it is then that Adams Alice in Wonderland approach to the vaccine mandate has so quickly be seen as the utter nonsense that it is.

FDNY unions have been especially quick to pounce on this latest Adams screw up. Rightly so, they have pressed the point that if performers and athletes are free to choose whether to vaccinate or not, then why should thousands of city workers not be at that same liberty. While we are no pandemic specialists, it’s not too hard to figure out that the COVID-19 virus, in all of its mutations, is going to make no discrimination whatsoever between an NYC firefighter and an NYC athlete.

Of course, true to form, Adams tries to make this a matter of economic concern. His flimsy argument is that lifting the vaccine mandate for those few of a more famous ilk will rake in more dollars for the city’s coffers, than the thousands and thousands and city’s public servants who keep the whole thing ticking over.

And those public city servants, just like the FDNY, do so without any desire to clamor for the fame and fortune that performers and athletes have the benefit of achieving. It’s either one rule for one and one for another, or all for one and one for all, and behaving like adults and not petulant children. Over 1,400 FDNY firefighters have already been dismissed to date because of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. More are likely to come. And the same is true of other public employment sectors across the city. Yet basketball players get a free pass?

What exactly is so hard about that that Eric Adams cannot comprehend while the vast majority of New Yorkers, and the rest of the country come to that, can?

Part of it would appear to be that Adams believes that he has some kind of special insight that none of his underling constituents happen to share? This is classic “do as I say, not do as I do” and it is very, very telling of the man that currently unjustly occupies the office of the mayor.

The fact is, he has not only no particular insight into anything, but he also has an absence of political acumen, empathy and, for good measure, historical awareness. That is why his choices are inevitably awful and allows for us to place our mortgage on the fact that he will get the next thing stone cold wrong too. As sure as night follows day.