New York City Patrolmen Rafael Ramos and Wenjin Liu are dead at the hands of an assassin who executed them as they sat in their patrol car eating lunch, working an overtime shift.

“They were, quite simply, assassinated,” a shaken NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said Saturday night.

The shooter — identified as Ismaaiyl Brinsley — boasted about wanting to murder cops in the hours before he ambushed the officers outside the Tompkins Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant about 2:45 p.m.

“I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours ... let’s take 2 of theirs,” Brinsley, 28, wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of a silver handgun.

He also included three hashtags: ShootThePolice, RIPErivGarner (sic) and RIPMikeBrown.

“This may be my final post ... I’m putting pigs in a blanket.”

There can be no question that this was a political assassination. It comes just over a week after marchers in Brooklyn, the same borough where the officers were assassinated, chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops!”

Mayor deBlasio failed to denouce this. His silence spoke volumes.

Compare the New York Times and Washington Post early reports on the crime: the Times omits any mention of motive. That tells you that the left is desperate to avoid the fact that deliberate political agitation led a possibly deranged man to political violence.

The left was anxious to blame the attack on Gabriel Giffords on an obscure post by Sarah Palin using targets to indicate competitive House races. Now, when demonstrators called for dead cops, and when the mayor of New York City spoke of his son as a potential victim of police racism, implying that police are racists, they will seek to deny a connection.

Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, and Mayor de Blasio are all implicated in stirring up hatred for the police and all have issued mealy-mouthed pious declarations of their grief. It will not be enough. President Obama, enjoying himself in Hawaii, will have to interrupt his vacation and make a strong statement. What he says will have a strong influence on the furtue of race relations.