It’s easy to lose track of how many women have now accused Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment. Is it six or 60? Every day a new accuser seems to come forward, driving the continual drumbeat for Cuomo to be removed from office as the media uses #MeToo as a cudgel.
Which is precisely the point. Last year, Cuomo was a useful idiot and foil to President Trump on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But now that Biden has been inaugurated, Cuomo is no longer needed or wanted for a variety of reasons. So what we’re seeing play out now has nothing to do with what is right or wrong. What is really driving all of this now are political calculations.
First, as the nursing home scandal in New York starts to unfold, things are becoming pretty embarrassing for the media and Left: here’s the guy they were lauding—even giving him Emmy for press conferences on his handling of coronavirus—when, in fact, his policies were killing over 15,000 elderly people. Instead of asking demanding questions of Cuomo in 2020, they propped him up because he was useful in undercutting Bad Orange Man.
So here we are with Cuomo, the supposed champion of the party that claims to embrace science, data, and compassion, getting caught doing pretty much the exact opposite of what they said inspired their praise. In defiance of the science (and honestly, common sense) he sent COVID patients into nursing homes filled with the most vulnerable. And on top of that, he went ahead and had his administration manipulate data to hide these facts. The same people who want to lecture us that we lack compassion by not wearing masks in public spaces, which is apparently on the level of committing genocide to these people, were in fact the ones killing thousands and thousands from their own actions and then trying to cover it up.
But now the entire situation is becoming really embarrassing for the media and Cuomo needs to exit stage left, except he has made it clear he has zero intention of doing so in the short term. So the media, which refused to cover the nursing home scandal, are stuck with having defended a guy who was a disaster on the coronavirus. To focus on the nursing home issue now would be an embarrassment to the media and the Left as it would highlight their miserable failings on the issue as well. So what to do? Solution: #MeToo him to death, which also distracts from the devastation of the nursing home deaths at Cuomo’s hands and, quite frankly, a lot of other Democrat governors.
So that is exactly what they are trying to do. If you’re the media, you can’t focus on the nursing home scandal for a number of reasons. It’s damaging and embarrassing to you, sure. But even more so, if for some strange reason as a member of the media you woke up one morning with ethics and a conscience, and decided the story must be pursued, you might bring down more than just Cuomo.
He’s not the only Democratic governor whose disastrous policies led to the deaths of so many people trapped in assisted living and nursing homes. If the media focuses on Cuomo’s nursing home disaster in New York, people might start asking questions about Phil Murphy in New Jersey, Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, even Gavin Newsom in California.
According to New Jersey’s Department of Health, nearly 8,000 long-term care residents died from the disease. In Michigan, it was more than 5,500. In Pennsylvania, it was more than 12,000. Newsom in California also has a nursing home problem.
We know that roughly 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in this country occurred in nursing homes or assisted living facilities. What would the real impact of COVID-19 have been in this country if Democratic governors had not implemented these disastrous policies?
But there’s another problem for Democrat governors regarding the nursing home scandal: what if there were financial incentives that led to this? Gavin Newsom paid nursing homes up to $1,000 per day to take in COVID-19 patients. People might start asking if the financial dealings went both ways: pay us a lot of money to take these patients and we’ll reward you with campaign contributions.
There are a lot of questions that need answering regarding Cuomo and his disastrous nursing home policies. But we shouldn’t stop at New York. We should look at New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, California, and even Minnesota as well because the American people deserve to know the truth about what happened.