It’s old news that the Rev. Al Sharpton is a bigot and a race-baiter who would sacrifice his most ardent fans — people of color — in pursuit of personal fame and glory.
But who knew that the self-styled civil-rights leader is also vain? That he’s obsessed with the sometimes awful things people say and write about him? That he wants to be liked?
Even by me.
“This is the ongoing saga of Al and Andrea,” he said. “I never take it personally. Who knows? One day we may end up as friends.”
Slow down there.
“I’m not trying to control the Police Department!” he told me on the phone this week. Strange words from a private citizen who’s been handed unprecedented influence over New York City’s police by his ideological twin, Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“I think people need to grow up,” he said of the many critics who’ve given him grief. “I’m not giving in to immaturity. It’s crazy,” added Sharpton, 59.
This is a man who seems stuck in the 1980s, when crime was high in New York City and the once-rotund reverend favored track suits, gold neck medallions and bouffant hairdos. He’s since slimmed down and replaced the clownish attire with tailored suits paired with slicked-back hair, particularly when hosting his show, “PoliticsNation,” on the far-left cable TV network MSNBC.
But these improvements are merely cosmetic. He hasn’t changed.
Things are going well for the man known as Rev. Al. The July 17 death of African-American Staten Islander Eric Garner, 43, who lost his life while resisting arrest by police officers picking him up for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, was tragic. For Rev. Al Inc., it’s been good for the grievance business.
Sharpton, who was sensibly banned from City Hall under the administration of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was welcomed back into the fold by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who never let him run the show — last week appeared at a City Hall “roundtable’’ discussion on police-community relations, perched beside de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton. He outrageously warned the mayor that if minorities are targeted by police for arrest, “I’ll be your worst enemy.”
He asserted that if the mayor’s biracial 16-year-old son, Dante, were not de Blasio’s kid, “He’d be a candidate for a chokehold.”
But Sharpton sees participating in local engagements as nuisances.
“Going to City Hall is not the thrill of my life,” groused Sharpton, who boasted, “I met with the president of the United States last week!”
A group of city cops held a news conference Tuesday in which they denounced Sharpton for whipping up racial unrest before all the facts are known about the cause of Garner’s death. Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch blasted the city Medical Examiner’s Office’s “political” declaration that Garner’s death was a homicide resulting from a chokehold — a maneuver banned by the NYPD that was allegedly used by Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo — combined with Garner’s obesity, asthma, sleep apnea, diabetes and heart disease.
“If they weren’t taking me seriously, they wouldn’t be holding press conferences, going crazy,” Sharpton told me.
Sharpton doesn’t like the “broken-windows theory,” which holds that if nuisances such as broken windows are not tolerated in communities, more serious acts of vandalism and crime won’t occur down the road. This theory has guided policing for more than 20 years, especially benefitting poorer neighborhoods with high minority populations.
“Are you telling me that people spit on the street more in Bed-Stuy than in Greenwich Village?” railed Sharpton, who these days beds down on Manhattan’s gentrified Upper West Side.
“I suppose if you look at that community six times more, that’s what you’ll find.”
Yes, he’s arguing that cops who go after low-level offenders are racists. Scary.
Does any law-abiding citizen really want to see New York return to the year 1990, when murders in the five boroughs surged to an all-time high of 2,245? The city ended last year with 333 murders, or 215 fewer lifeless bodies than in 1963, when New York’s murder rate was first tallied.
Sharpton rose to fame in 1987 as a cheerleader for the rape hoax perpetrated by upstate African-American girl Tawana Brawley.
I’ll never agree with Sharpton, not even on the weather. Will I be his friend?
Sorry, Rev. Al. I don’t think so.
Amen, St. Joan
“I’m gonna stand in front of Madonna’s house and I’m gonna throw paintballs at her windows and let’s see if she then comes out and has me arrested,’’ comedienne Joan Rivers, 81, said in a voice-mail message for me.
Rivers was thrilled to be featured in my column honoring celebrities who’ve risked international scorn by speaking out in support of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas terrorists. She told TMZ.com, “Let me tell you, if New Jersey were firing rockets into New York, we would wipe them out.’’
Madonna, 55, posted on Facebook a picture of flowers she compared to Palestinian kids. “Who has the right to destroy them?’’ she wrote. “No one.’’
Rivers moaned that famous Jews, from singer Barbra Streisand to director Steven Spielberg, film producer Harvey Weinstein and music producer David Geffen, are “scared sh-tless to come out of the woods and take a stand’’ for the Jewish state.
Israel could use more friends like this.
It’s nunsense!
Manhattan corporate lawyer John Carley, who is married to former NBC-4 TV news anchor Pia Lindstrom, daughter of the late actress Ingrid Bergman, is leading a group of filthy-rich Hamptons summer residents who demand that a road sign reading “Sister Jackie’s Way’’ be removed from the tony enclave of Water Mill.
The sign, honoring Sister Jacqueline Walsh, 59, who was killed in a 2012 hit-and-run, evidently bums out the sensitive 1 percenters.
Deal with it.
Old married couple
So far, so good.
Reality-TV creature Kim Kardashian and rapper Kanye West completed 73 days of marriage, quite a feat given that Kim filed for divorce from her second husband, basketballer Kris Humphries, after 72 days of wedded misery.