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March 5, 2021 - 5:30pm
Perhaps the appeal of Andrew Cuomo was that for liberals he was the anti-Trump. Whereas the president seemed rash, chaotic and uncaring, the governor of New York exuded a sense of competent authority. His Covid briefings were so popular among liberal Americans that he was awarded an Emmy. “With all of this adulation that you’re getting for doing your job, are you thinking about running for President?” asked CNN presenter Chris Cuomo, who, conveniently, is his brother. No, said Cuomo, prompting howls of disappointment from the media.
But a sense of competence is exactly that. It has become increasingly obvious that Cuomo’s assured, authoritative bearing obscured significant mismanagement and stonking egotism. Journalists who were once gushing “Cuomosexuals” are now belatedly, shamefacedly having second thoughts.
The Wall Street Journal tells us that Cuomo’s top advisers “pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged.” Earlier this year, in January, a report by the New York attorney general accused Cuomo’s administration of dramatically undercounting deaths from Covid-19. The attorney general suggested that the administration’s insistence that nursing homes must not refuse patients admission on the basis of their being infected with the virus may have increased the risk of harm.
It would be wrong to charge Cuomo with being some kind of devious master manipulator. The sad truth is that the talking head brigade were never conned as much as they conned themselves. Outliers like ProPublica were reporting on Cuomo’s dangerous policies last year, and Right-wing elevation of such reportage forced Cuomo to respond in his 2020 book American Crisis.
In that book, which Cuomo wrote while he was apparently guiding New York through the pandemic, the governor claimed:
Any idiot could see how disingenuous this was. To tell nursing homes not to reject patients on the basis of Covid status is to tell them that they must either accept such patients or accept no patients at all. Granted, it would be preposterous to place all of the blame for Covid deaths in nursing homes on Governor Cuomo. Nursing homes across the world have struggled during the pandemic because members of staff have introduced the virus. But there are compelling reasons to believe that Cuomo’s directive exacerbated the situation, and that his administration undercounted deaths. It is therefore shocking to see how few journalists were interested in asking obvious questions.
Cuomo is facing simultaneous allegations of sexual harassment. Journalists, sensing blood, have drummed up more trivial stories about Cuomo being Benny Hillishly flirtatious. Cuomo might have behaved poorly —and no doubt investigations will be undertaken to determine that — but I hope commentators and public officials will not focus on private indiscretions at the expense of political failures. The latter are more consequential, of course, but focusing on the former also gives journalists an excuse to darken their sunny assessments of Cuomo without self-reflection: blaming his decline on misconduct behind closed doors rather than policies any hack could have investigated.
Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald, The American Conservative and Arc Digital on a variety of topics including literature and politics.
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SubscribeWe have known since last summer about the way in which he shoved Covid patients into care homes, killing an estimated 13,000 people. The media covered it up because…well, they are the media and they lie for the Democrats and they hate Trump.
Cuomo refused to use the hospital ship and the other temporary hospital provided by Trump, because that would have made Trump look good. Cuomo gave the owners of the care homes legal indemnity because they contributed to his election campaign.
That is how evil these people are, as we have known for a long time now.
Cuomo seems about average evil to me, and being a longtime resident of New York, city and state, I’ve had plenty of time to observe him. His recent rise and fall have been almost entirely a frothy media creation. It was not hard for him to look good standing next to Trump, especially to a population not fascinated by their Whiteness, but that’s not saying much. He isn’t very popular at home, but he knows where the strings and levers that run the state are, and where the bodies are buried, even if his policies are somewhat less than brilliant or even moral. We’ve seen worse here. Hopefully sometime in the future we’ll see better, but it’s hard to beat machine politics as long as people support it. In this, New York State is not unique.
I am not a supporter of the Cuomo brothers but I did read an interesting comment in the NYT (perhaps the commentators are also suspicious) from a doctor who was in the midst of the earliest and worst part of the Covid pandemic. She allowed as how there was no real solution as to what to do with elderly Covid patients who had been hospitalized but who no longer needed to be when their beds were needed. Many had no place to return to but the nursing homes. They either had no families or it weren’t allowed to return to them with the possibility of infecting them
I offer this not to excuse Como but jut to say there were no alternatives available at that time. I wasn’t there and as most of us have , to depend solely on the media to form an opinion As many here have admitted, depending on the media to form opinions can be a bit dicey. . Knowing the media’s love of sex scandals, I I happen to believe that it is his sexual goings on that are informing his fall from glory far more than the elderly in nursing homes.
To expect shame from the media is to believe in unicorns and fairy dust.
“shame of the media” – no they will only do that if the can Monetize it.
Schadenfreude is a despicable emotion, but in this case I am ready to overlook that in myself. That this totally creepy, horrible, nasty, man gets caught out has cheered me very much. I always remembered Wild’s ‘Importance of Being Earnest’, which contains most of the truth of society.
― Oscar Wilde, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
It’s a cuomover!
Apparently his best line with the ladies was ‘Cuomover to my place’.
People have been decrying Cuomo’s Covid crimes for almost a year. But the establishment, DNC-sponsored media snuffed it all out, and went even further with the Emmy nonsense, and having him write a book about “leadership”. (You better believe that was advised.)
In some kind of inverted Oceania-esque sick joke, he was exalted as a hero. And not only blue-pilled droids bought it, but a lot of people on the right as well.
Now, as the scandal is overwhelmingly undeniable, it not only damages (maybe ruins) Cuomo, but hugely implicates the Democrat party as well.
Cuomo became a DNC liability virtually overnight.
The DNC, who does not care about a single soul, needed something unrelated to their murderous Covid policy to make Cuomo disappear.
Into the scene enters a perfectly timed set of sexual allegations (now four?) that will effectively sacrifice Cuomo–the individual—on the altar of DNC sovereignty.
That’s not saying the allegations are false. But they would have been buried, just like Tara Reade, if Cuomo was still an asset to the Democrat party.
The public’s disgust with Cuomo is effectively satisfied as he disappears in shame as a “sexual predator”, instead of the lying, document-shredding, grandma-murdering avatar of the Democrat Party that he is.
edit: six accusers now.
It’s fun watching the woke being force fed one of their own
He seemed so impressive when the world was briefly in the throes of ignorance about the realities of Covid. Well that ended pretty soon for so many of us.
Did you not checkout his physiognomy? Surely it says ‘sleezeball’, does it not?
There is a local leftie blogger and media person who routinely calls him ‘Ratface Andy’ which you can add to your collection. Personally I have nothing against rats; they work earnestly to keep our subways and alleys free of decaying edibles.
No he didn’t. He never seemed to anything other than a drama queen at best, and a corrupt incompetent at worst.
To those of us who have a skeptical bent he certainly seemed creepy and slimy all along. But many in the media and the Donkey party are emotional infants who are seduced by his pleasant-sounding flirtations.
Please leave donkeys alone. They do not deserve the bad press.
How about calling said party, the Demonocratic Party?
Namecallling is childish. We are infantile enough here.
He should be electrocuted as soon as possible !
Alas l, the former (i.e. the “indiscretions”) are more consequential.