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By Shavana Abruzzo
Brooklyn Daily
Mayor DeBlasio’s grudging thanks to his predecessor for leading the city through tough times was the high point of an inauguration speech that needed less lungs and more heart.
Tacky guest speakers provided the low point, spouting enough hot air to float a blimp.
The motor mouths — dumb to the propriety of the occasion and embodying the worst of our city — thrashed the outgoing mayor like a pinata as he sat in the front row, while lobbing racist spitballs like hand grenades at the family of New Yorkers viewing the induction outside City Hall and from home, and slandering the world’s most inclusive metropolis as being an apartheid state for the past 12 years when that era gave some of them their start.
One opportunist, Public Advocate Letitia James, saw fit to rail against the “gilded age of inequality,” while being far from a model civil rights advocate herself.
James slapped 61-year-old Texas laborer David Day with a lawsuit in March 2010 for a shin scrape she sustained after illegally jaywalking into his legally parked trailer hitch in Fort Greene. Tish, then raking in $122,000 a year as a councilwoman, heartlessly ignored Day’s plea for leniency and hired a team of lawyers to gouge the struggling senior for what she claimed were “serious, severe and permanent [injuries] to her limbs and body.” At the time, James refused medical treatment and denied this newspaper access to her medical records.
This column urged her to withdraw the case, unless she wanted to be known “as a petty witch who harassed a poor old man trying to eke out a living in his golden years.” She quietly dropped her suit soon after that.
James wasn’t the only gloominary on Bill’s dais. Youth Poet Laureate Ramya Ramana, an Indian American, waxed poetic about the “brown-stoned and brown-skinned playing a tug of war,” disregarding her ancestral government’s atrocious abuses, including custodial killings, torture, and cold-shouldering its impoverished masses.
Koran thumper Imam Askia Muhammad of the Department of Corrections offended with his mere presence, given his support for the Nation of Islam, whose leader Louis Farrakhan considers white people “a race of devils.”
Harry Belafonte, whom DeBlasio should have ditched on the campaign trail for associating the KKK to billionaire energy moguls and philanthropists Charles and David Koch — whose hundreds of millions of dollars to charities have benefited all Americans — warbled ad nauseam about “divided communities.” And Sanitation Department chaplain Rev. Fred Lucas Jr., who delivered the invocation, astoundingly compared Gotham to a “plantation.”
These carpetbaggers trashed the most important day of Mayor DeBlasio’s public life, and he let them, in a disturbing precursor of the Bill-oney yet to come.
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