New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is absolutely awful. Whether he is screaming at reporters asking legitimate questions about his needlessly confusing COVID-19 strategy or yucking it up on CNN with his equally awful baby brother about his cavernous nostrils, he is just terrible.
This doesn’t even take into account his horrible management of the COVID-19 pandemic—his state has the second-highest number of deaths per 100,000. Cuomo asked for hospital ships, mobile hospitals, and ventilators and got them all. He squawked about not receiving ventilators while they were sitting in a warehouse waiting to be picked up. Then he didn’t even use the additional beds he’d been given to house COVID-positive patients.
Instead, he had one of the most unconscionable and deadly COVID policies in the country. By executive order, he mandated that COVID-positive nursing home residents be returned to their facilities. This was after it was clear that elderly people with preexisting conditions are one of the most vulnerable populations to deadly consequences from the virus after we had all watched in horror as COVID-19 ripped through the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, early in the pandemic.
They gave Cuomo an Emmy for his self-serving and vainglorious COVID-19 press conferences. It should have been obvious when Democrats and the media televised his musings that they were trying to turn him into a big star. Being up for Time’s Person of the Year was also a slap in the face to those destroyed and mourning due to his horrible pandemic management. He even wrote a book touting his leadership during the crisis and took time away from his (terrible) management of the pandemic ravaging his state to promote it. He had a sculptor create a monument to his supposed genius.
Now, this:
I am honored to receive the 2020 Edward M. Kennedy Institute Award for Inspired Leadership.
I learned about humanity, leadership and putting people first from the great Senator Ted Kennedy.
Congratulations to my fellow recipient Gov. Charlie Baker.
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) December 10, 2020
Putting people first? That’s rich, yet unintentionally appropriate. Perhaps it’s really a reference on how to cover up your deadly decisions and get away with it. Teddy certainly wrote the master’s class on this after crashing his car into the Chappaquiddick River and walking away, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. Cuomo, like Teddy before him, is a master at putting himself first. Cuomo, like Teddy before him, sought to preserve his political ambitions even at the expense of other people’s lives.
Cuomo’s unconscionable nursing home policy is credited with killing a minimum of 6,500 nursing home residents. Exactly how many it killed may never be known because New York is the only state that did not track nursing home residents who became sick in their facility and died in the hospital.
Of course, his administration has also circled the wagons. The executive order was scrubbed from the governor’s website. Then Cuomo denied it ever happened after blaming President Trump and his team for the nursing home disaster. Thank goodness the internet is forever, and his deadly nursing home policy exists in the archives. The memory hole isn’t deep enough to hide Cuomo’s deadly actions — not yet, anyway.
The families of the deceased demanded an investigation and got one thanks to one high-profile family member, Fox News Meteorologist Janice Dean. However, even the subsequent investigation did not provide transparency. According to ProPublica, the report from the New York State Department of Health was severely lacking:
The report said the staff members “transmitted the virus unknowingly — through no fault of their own — while working, which then led to resident infection.”
In the days since its release, the report has come under withering criticism, from some nursing home executives, medical experts, scientists, and elected officials in both New York and Washington. The critics have challenged the report’s conclusions as dubious speculation and accused Cuomo and Zucker of issuing a cynical document meant to insulate themselves from blame.
“I don’t think this report convincingly demonstrates that the policy was not another important driver of deaths,” said Denis Nash, an epidemiologist and executive director of the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health. “The key consideration here is a question of ‘what if.’ What if there had been no such policy. … Would there have been fewer deaths? How many fewer? … They didn’t fully leverage epidemiological methods to rigorously address that question, in my view.”
To date, Cuomo has taken zero responsibility for his own policy or the consequences. Until the end of his life, Teddy Kennedy never took responsibility for the death of Kopechne. Yet, both men are held up as heroes in the Democrat Party and showered with accolades and awards. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about who the Democrats are.
These two cowards could also be the best argument against political dynasties ever made. Andrew Cuomo and his hero Teddy Kennedy were made for each other.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member