Maybe Andrew Cuomo is cut out to be a Democratic president after all. He certainly shares Barack Obama’s passion for shifting blame when something he does goes south.
Just look at Cuomo’s record of responses to his ill-fated executive order directing nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for COVID-19. He has tried to rationalize the 5,000 deaths that have resulted by stating that people in nursing homes are going to die of COVID “despite whatever [sic] you do.” When that explanation didn’t fly, he intimated that he was simply following Donald Trump’s orders, despite the president’s never having advocated any such thing. He even tried bleachbitting the New York State Health Department website of his order.
No matter what he does, he doesn’t seem to be able to wash off the blood on his hands. So he has tried a new tack. It is his assertion now that the nursing homes themselves are at fault for following his order.
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The only problem with this latest attempt at blame-shifting is that the governor’s own words are out there as part of the public record for anyone who cares to read them. On Apr. 25, several weeks after the order was implemented, NBC News reported:
… [I]n New York, the controversy over the mandate has escalated as the virus has battered hospitals and nursing homes alike. … A broad swath of nursing homes across the state have already accepted COVID-positive hospital patients in compliance with the mandate, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo has openly criticized facilities for opposing it.
“They don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a Thursday news conference. “If they can’t do it, we’ll put them in a facility that can do it.”
But facilities were scarcely able to handle the patient loads foisted on them, much less accommodate the spill-over from other nursing homes. When they complained to the governor that there were short on supplies or staff, he told them it was their problem.
