Photo by kimberlyfaye.

Let’s travel back in time to the good old days of February 2010, shall we? It was then that two New York Congressmen had a grand old time taking potshots about Washington’s lack of strength in the face of overpowering snow accumulation, which was, to them, an indication of our overall suckitude. In case you forgot, here’s what New York Representatives Eliot Engel and Mike McMahon thought about our response to snowfall which basically crippled the area for at least a week:

“Wimp is the word, let me tell you,” said Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel.

“In New York, I think I can count on one hand all the time they’ve closed the schools for my kids or even for me and my wife. Yet in D.C., there only has to be a threat of snow and they’re closing the schools for a week,” added Engel. “In New York, there’s no way that would happen. It’s like night and day.”

[…]

“Certainly there’s a different mindset where every threat of snow is the storm of the century,” said Rep. Mike McMahon (D-Staten Island), who along with other congressional delegates had no work this week because of the snow and no work next week due to a holiday recess. “[In New York] we plan for it. We budget for it. Every inch of snow costs about a million dollars.”

Yeah! Because there’s no way that New York, the greatest place in the history of the freakin’ world, would ever struggle to get out from under a massive snow storm, right?

In light of the blizzard which coated most of the Northeast — including both Engel and McMahon’s districts — but narrowly missed D.C., both Engel and McMahon have been unfortunately silent. It’s shocking, really — with such a history of tough talk, both Representatives should have booked it up to New York and really whipped Mayor Michael Bloomberg from pillar to post for running a city where snow has stranded people on subways for 32 hours, forced slow plows which can’t handle operating in the snow into action, completely shut down one of the busiest airports in the world, caused the city’s fire department to buckle under a backlog of thousands of phone calls and left thousands of people — many of them Engel and McMahon’s constituents — stuck in their homes.

Hmm. Trash talking without the ability to back it up? Sounds kind of, oh, I don’t know, like the calling card of a wimp.