If Long Island Rail Road workers go on strike while Mayor de Blasio is vacationing in Italy, he can expect stranded commuters to try to crash at Gracie Mansion, comedian Stephen Colbert told the mayor Wednesday.
In de Blasio’s first appearance on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” the faux conservative host jokingly mocked de Blasio as a “socialist” and “communist” and lampooned his plans to skip town with a strike looming.
“If you are over there and the strike actually comes and people can’t get [OUT OF] town, can we just go crash at Gracie Mansion?” Colbert asked.
“You’re going to have to talk to my wife about that,” replied de Blasio, who also said he’s “hopeful there will a resolution,” but the LIRR “is under the jurisdiction of Governor Cuomo.”
“Not my problem! Not my problem!” taunted Colbert. “Bring me the bowl! Bring me the bowl that Pontius Pilate may wash his hands!”
He suggested the mayor might resolve the union workers’ gripes by “sending in the Pinkertons with the truncheons to give ’em a taste of old Daddy Warbucks.”
Colbert jokingly called his interview with de Blasio “my biggest coup since landing Joe Biden on \\[online matchmaking site\\] Tinder.” He welcomed the mayor to the show with a reel of Fox News talking heads tearing into de Blasio’s left-leaning vision, including host Sean Hannity calling him “Comrade New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.”
“You want to bring us back to the ’80s — the bad days of the squeegee men and the rampant crime and leg warmers,” Colbert charged. “That’s what you want.”
De Blasio quipped in response, “The legwarmers weren’t so bad.”
He talked up his “progressive vision” to tackle “vast income inequality,” which didn’t sit well with the Colbert character either.
“You mean socialist. Progressive means socialist! You’re a socialist!” Colbert said. “You raised money for the Sandinistas in the 1980s. You’re a socialist. You’re a communist.”
De Blasio, who was joined by his wife and two kids for the taping, took the mocking in stride.
Asked by Colbert to “admit that Mayor Bloomberg was a great mayor for this city,” he gave his predecessor some limited props.
“Staying for a third term was a huge mistake. It was very undemocratic. He used his wealth to achieve it,” he said. “But in office he did some very good things for public health. He did some good things in terms of making us a more environmentally sustainable city. He did some good investments in education. But in the end he did not address income inequality. He did not address stop-and-frisk.”
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