It’s a sign of our sad times when the candidates for mayor in next week’s election refuse to politicize Wednesday’s terror attack while the president doesn’t hesitate to jump right into the shallow end of a dangerous pool.

Less than 12 hours after emergency workers were carrying bodies off the bike path along the West Side Highway, our tormentor-in-chief took to twitter to all but blame Senator Chuck Schumer for the carnage, saying he sponsored an immigration program that allowed the attacker to immigrate legally to America from Uzbekistan.

Never mind – as NY1’s Josh Robin points out – that the program had bipartisan support and was signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Never mind that Schumer and a bipartisan group Senators tried to overhaul the program in 2013 but saw the bill stymied in the House.

It’s sad that we have to waste time fact checking the president instead of coming together as a country in the aftermath of a tragedy. It’s the same president who didn’t want to “politicize” things following a far-bloodier attack in Las Vegas last month, saying we could talk about gun control at some future date.

We’ve come a very long way from George W. Bush’s campaign pledge of being “a uniter, not a divider” to a president today who doesn’t even give lip service to bringing together a tortured nation. It shouldn’t be surprising given that his chief of staff, the “adult in the room”, thinks that the Civil War came about because of a lack of compromise while his press secretary looks baffled when asked about basic American History.

 Sitting in the White House in the darkness, our president grabs his Android phone to send out vitriol aimed at his enemies, perceived or real, stuck in an endless loop of 21^st Century navel gazing. The only thing he has to tweet are the tweets themselves. And we all should be afraid.

Bob Hardt