Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refuses to blame Mayor Bill de Blasio for his failure to prepare New Yorkers properly for last week’s fatal storm. Instead, she echoes his line of blaming climate change and the National Weather Service.

“We needed more advance notice from the NWS,” Ocasio-Cortez said after a tour-the-damage event with the mayor. Huh? At 3:23 p.m., as Ida was hitting, the agency tweeted a dire warning: “SIGNIFICANT AND LOCALLY LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODING IS EXPECTED GOING INTO THE EVENING HOURS.”

But the mayor didn’t call a press conference to alert the city; he filmed a self-promoting TV spot.

And the cause of the storm is irrelevant to the incompetence of the city’s preparations.

Ocasio-Cortez might want to exploit the suffering to promote her own Green New Deal agenda, but that still doesn’t oblige her to whitewash de Blasio’s failings. Putting ideology above everything is not a good way to protect against future needless deaths.