On the menu today: a soup-to-nuts indictment of the Cuomo brothers, anti-Semitic violence in the streets of America’s biggest cities, a familiar face returns to the NFL, and a counterargument on those flying objects that are not yet identified.
As I’ve noted, you’d have to look far and wide to find a publication that has covered and discussed New York governor Andrew Cuomo as thoroughly, skeptically, critically, and even furiously as National Review. The past year and a half has been a period of spectacular upheaval in American life, but somewhere in the top-five revelations is the fact that the governor most praised and celebrated by the national media during the pandemic was probably the very worst among them.
Cuomo enacted a policy from late March to May 2020 forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus-positive patients after they were discharged from hospitals, causing the virus to spread like wildfire among elderly nursing-home residents. One study found that more than 6,300 coronavirus-positive patients were readmitted to nursing homes, and that more than 5,700 nursing-home residents died between April 12 and June 4. “In the upstate region, facilities that admitted at least one positive patient during this period accounted for 82 percent of coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, even though they had only 32 percent of the residents.”
Cuomo and his aides attempted to prevent the New York State Health Department from releasing the true number of coronavirus victims in nursing homes for at least five months. The FBI and Department of Justice are investigating whether Cuomo and his staff misled the federal government when it provided data on COVID-19-related deaths of nursing-home residents. Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitted to New York legislators that the administration had withheld information from them about the true number of nursing-home deaths because it feared a DOJ investigation.
One study concluded that New York state suffered the worst combination of excess deaths and job losses out of all 50 states.
State troopers were used to rush testing samples of Cuomo family members to a lab for expedited processing.
Separate from the pandemic, nine women, including several former aides, a member of the Executive Chamber staff, a wedding-reception guest, a current aide, and a former reporter in Albany have accused Cuomo of sexually harassing them. The accusations were so plausible and numerous that Cuomo allies such as Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand saw no other option than to call for his resignation.
Cuomo’s initial response to the accusations was to agree to appoint someone to investigate himself. Cuomo aides allegedly leaked the personnel file of a former staffer to the press after her sexual-harassment accusations went public. As the accusations piled up, the head of New York’s vaccine-distribution effort called county officials to assess their loyalty to Cuomo.
And after all that, Cuomo is set to be paid more than $5 million for his victory-lap book, one that he allegedly misused state resources to write, having state employees help him write it during working hours.
Our entire system for how a public official is supposed to be held accountable for his actions broke down completely. Cuomo emoted effectively in his first press conferences during the pandemic, and a whole lot of people in major national media and quite a few New Yorkers decided they loved him. Some people changed their minds about him, but not nearly enough.
I get why Democrats look at Donald Trump’s supporters in the Republican Party and gasp, with outrage, derision, and disbelief, “How can they still support that guy? Don’t they want to hold him accountable for anything he’s done?” But what few of them can see is that the same phenomenon of unflinching loyalty and reflexive dismissal of misbehavior flourishes on their side, too. This week, 71 percent of New York City Democrats told a pollster they approve of the job Cuomo is doing.
But now there is a new and fascinating wrinkle to all this, as we now know there is no longer a boundary separating CNN’s prime-time programming and the governor’s office. Andrew Cuomo popped up on his brother’s show so often during the pandemic, you would think CNN’s 8 p.m. hour had become an Albany-based, government-affairs-focused, public-access television. That is, until the wacky prop comedy began, and the two Cuomos lapsed into their Smothers Brothers “Mom always liked you best” schtick.
