Shoot-from-the-lip Rep. Charles Rangel ducked for cover yesterday as Mayor Bloomberg angrily blasted him for making a racially provocative crack about a cop-on-cop, friendly-fire tragedy.What a comedian.
Rangel had snidely warned President Obama, who was in town Saturday with the first lady, to be sure not to "run around East Harlem unidentified" -- alluding to the fatal, mistaken shooting of a black cop by a white cop in the neighborhood two days earlier.
"I have a lot of respect for Charlie Rangel, but in this respect, he's just plain wrong," a livid Bloomberg said.
"This is a tragedy," he added, saying he spent time talking with slain Officer Omar Edwards' wife, Danielle, and the couple's two young sons.
"This was started by a 30-something-year-old, probably high on drugs," the mayor said -- referring to the thief Edwards had just chased down on East 125th Street when he was fatally shot by Officer Andrew Dunton, who had mistaken the off-duty cop for a criminal.
"[Edwards'] mother kept saying to me, 'You're always a police officer, off-duty or on-duty,' "
The mayor also insisted, "There's no reason to suspect this had any racial undertones."
Rangel had stirred the already roiling and racially charged atmosphere surrounding the tragedy while speaking at a rally in honor of Edwards on Saturday.
"Make certain [Obama] doesn't run around East Harlem unidentified," Rangel had said. "If [he] did not have the Secret Service . . . around him, [city cops] wouldn't know if he was president of the United States."
The accidental governor, David Paterson, seemed to echo the absurd statements of Rangel.
"It's just that he is probably responding to the fact that this type of incident had happened in the district that he's represented a number of times before," Paterson said. "I think whatever he says expresses the viewpoints of a lot of people."
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