New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's controversial comment that he fears for his biracial son Dante's life at the hands of the NYPD shows voters elected a "lunatic," veteran Republican consultant Mary Matalin says.
"I don't how you New Yorkers — God love you, I go there all the time, I love New York — I don't know how you can go from [Michael] Bloomberg to de Blasio. I just don't get it," Matalin said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"I went to law school in New York before [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani and it was a scary place. It's the most improved, reformed, wonderful city in the entire interplanetary system and you now hired this lunatic?
"He's a lunatic for more reasons than that, [and this is] additional evidence," Matalin said.
De Blasio's comments about his son came as he reacted to a grand jury's decision not to indict NYPD officer Peter Pantaleo, who used an unauthorized chokehold on Eric Garner, a man selling unlicensed, unstamped cigarettes — called loosies — in the New York City borough of Staten Island.
The 43-year-old Garner, an obese man with respiratory problems, died after repeatedly telling the police, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" His death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, leading many to expect Pantaleo would face a murder or manslaughter charge.
The white Democratic mayor — who is married to Chirlane McCray, an African-American woman — said he worried about the safety of his mixed-race son Dante in interactions with police, just like parents of other black children.
"[He's] a good young man, law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong," de Blasio said. "And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we've had to literally train him — as families have all over this city for decades — in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him."
Matalin, who was an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and campaign director for President George W. Bush, said the introduction of race into the Garner decision — which has triggered protests in cities across the country — is a case of bad politics.
"They are conflating many issues and politicizing issues for which there are real problems and there are real solutions," Matalin said.
"It's not about race. It's about a panoply of conflated issues from education to employment to juvenile justice to the justice system in general. So that is a different issue."
She said there is a "big difference" between the Garner case and the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri, where white police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot black teen Michael Brown, sparking months of racial unrest.
"There is an absence of common sense when cops, who are underpaid and over-endangered, are chasing people around and feeling endangered themselves because people are selling loose cigarettes," she said.
"I mean, come on. The penalty doesn't comport with the crime and that's a consequence not of training, but of [a] crazy liberal agenda.
"It is true that blacks are disproportionately pulled over for drugs or disproportionately convicted, prosecuted, and we have a drug-war problem, too. Cigarettes don't even fall into this. That's a tax problem," Matalin said.
She added that if the price of cigarettes was less than $13 a pack in New York — the result of heavy taxation — people like Eric Garner would not be trying to sell them loosely.
"This is just insane. The whole thing is insane, and to conflate it and bring it to the presidential level as a fuming distrust between the police community and the African-American community is disgraceful," Matalin said.
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