"Mayor Caligula, Your Horse is on Line One": Welcome to Bill De Blasio's NYC

I’ve got
a new column up at The Daily Beast. It’s about the policy
agenda of newly sworn-in Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, whose
first agenda item is to…shut down Central Park horse-carriage
rides.

Here’s the start of the col:

If historians debate whether Caligula’s apocryphal attempt to
make his horse a consul of Rome signified serious mental
illness or was just the emperor’s idea of a joke, contemporary New
Yorkers should have no doubt that their new mayor, Bill de Blasio,
is nuttier than a squirrel’s turd.

Upon taking office, de Blasio has made it his
absolute highest priority “to quickly and aggressively move to make
horse carriages no longer a part of the landscape in New York
City.” Seemingly paraphrasing Richard Crenna’s Col. Trautman in the
first Rambo movie, he flatly told a pre-inauguration press
conference, “It’s over.” A hundred-plus years of tradition and a
hundred-plus jobs (for humans) gone, just like that, because de
Blasio believes that horse-drawn carriages “are not humane.” In
their place will be “electric, vintage-replica
tourist-friendly vehicles that provide jobs for current
drivers.”

And New Yorkers thought that the days of bizarre, Mad King
Ludwig of Bavaria-style edicts had finally ended when three-term
Mayor Mike Bloomberg finally left City Hall. Among many other
things, Bloomberg even banned food donations to homeless
shelters because bureaucrats couldn’t verify the gifts’ salt
content. What is it that perpetually outdated columnist Cindy Adams
likes to say? “Only in New York, kids, only in New York.”