Dear Santa Claus,

’Tis the season of miracles, where all things are possible. In that spirit, please save New York.

While all gifts are appreciated, under present circumstances, an honest and caring mayor would be cause for a joyous and merry Christmas.

Before our eyes, the great city of love and lore is fading, its fabric shredded by a political class both rapacious and timid. Choked with endlessly snarled traffic, marred by overflowing trash cans and scammed by organized sloth that tithes only to itself, decline is in the air.

Fetid street encampments, defended as proof of compassion, offend decency and are a crime of cruelty against the mentally ill. Yet they multiply because no easy solution is available and none in command has the stomach for hard choices.

Underground is no sanctuary from the chaos. The poets writing on the subway walls ask only for deliverance from rats and missing trains. The light at the end of the tunnel is just a light, an expensive one to be sure.

At the top of this unhappy heap sits a mayor besotted with arrogance and indifference. In his fifth year, it is not accurate to say he is coasting because coasting implies movement.

He is asleep at the wheel and has no respect for time. Wake him at your peril.

Caution, he is a grinch and admission to his inner sanctum is not free. The price is right for those with means and schemes, but there is no room at the inn for the pure of heart.

His aim is not to repair the whole, but to slice and dice the 8 million into competing tribes. Yet to be the apple of his eye is more often a curse than a blessing.

Those poor souls trapped in the Housing Authority know a lump of coal is where his heart should be. They suffer as he huffs and puffs and demands that others pay the freight and do the work. As the paint fades and mold appears, as the boiler shuts down and the pipes freeze up, he scuttles from the fray.

Ho ho ho, Santa, make us jolly and bring us a chief executive who is honest and industrious, who prizes sincerity over posturing, gratitude over entitlement.

Someone humble enough to work long hours in the seat of government instead of phoning it in from home after late-morning exercises. Give us someone who loves this town first and last and isn’t eager for greener pastures or greater glory.

Gift us a leader such as we enjoyed in the past, men who were willing to answer the bell anytime, day or night. They knew their task was not to seal leaky pipes or put out fires, but to calm the metropolis with a firm hand and to show that someone is minding the store and plowing the snow.

To show that someone gives a damn.

Please send us someone who attacks problems instead of critics and spares no effort to find answers. A mayor who understands that integrity is not optional and that character is destiny.

A mayor who is willing to obey the spirit as well as the letter of the Freedom of Information Law, and all laws.

Please grant us a leader who realizes that with privilege comes responsibility, and that taxpayer money is not to be spent recklessly.

And a helper for those who get parking tickets who doesn’t help and voter outreach officials who don’t vote are not worthy of sinecures. They are a sacrilege to public service.

Is it too much to wish for a mayor who accepts that his wife is his wife, not an independent official deserving of a lavish entourage? And who understands it is unseemly for her to use the public dime to audition for a sinecure of her own. If it’s work she wants, private jobs are plentiful.

Last but never least, do not forget the children, all the children. Grant us a leader who sees New York’s young as deserving of the very best education, and is bold enough to rise above personal disputes and put duty ahead of political gain.

If there must be prejudice, let it be directed toward excellence and achievement. Let merit be the guiding virtue and let the prophet’s dream come true: That all children will one day live in a city “where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Please, Santa, you are New York’s only hope. Gladden our hearts with a miracle at City Hall.

NY Times’ francovile hypocrisy

Now they tell us: The big mistake of American deplorables and irredeemables is that they were born in the wrong country and have the wrong accent.

If they had the good sense to be French, the New York Times would have had sympathy for their plight. It might have approved, or at least understood, their votes for Donald Trump.

The Gray Lady, in a recent editorial, expressed tender sympathy for the heart of the protest movement roiling France. It said President Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax increase was an “insufferable insult” to people who believe that “government ministers, bureaucrats, trade unions and especially the political class … are deaf to their economic struggles.”

Hmmm.

The paper, while noting that it supports Macron’s general approach and abhors anarchic violence, cautioned that “high-minded policies” on emissions “need to be explained and mitigated for the many people struggling at the borderline of poverty.”

This is remarkable because the words and tone stand in stark contrast to the paper’s demonization of Americans who reject those very same policies. And President Trump is the devil himself for pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

To say the Times is obsessed with climate change is an understatement. It publishes one, two or three stories seemingly every day warning that the Apocalypse is coming. Dissent is treated as heresy.

The paper champions carbon taxes, wants to limit coal mining, opposes most pipelines and generally backs schemes favoring renewables, no matter the cost to taxpayers or industry.

Yet it offers little respite for Americans “struggling at the borderline of poverty” because they lost their jobs when Barack Obama pursued those policies.

There could be complex reasons why the paper takes contradictory approaches to similar problems, but I suspect a simple one: prejudice. No doubt Times editorial writers get to Paris more often than to the Rust Belt and Appalachia.

And why not? The food and wine are better and Paris is beautiful. Except when it’s burning.

GoFundWall drive needed

Just in time, given Tuesday’s main event at the White House: Reader Nolan Thomson Hare wants to help build a border wall. He writes, “Can you please give me a note about where I can find a campaign organized to collect money from the general public to help our President and our country build the wall?”

Any ideas, let me know.

AOC’s (He)brewhaha

Headline: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she’s Jewish.

Oy. Haven’t Jews suffered enough?