There won’t be any more Emmy awards for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The oddsmakers who just a week ago were crunching the numbers on Cuomo’s chances of reaching the White House in 2024 have moved on to greener pastures. So have the journalists that once provided glowing coverage of the governor’s mastery of the COVID pandemic.
In place of all the adulation come denouncements of Cuomo as a con man. All he “had to do was admit he made a well-intentioned mistake when he ordered nursing homes to accept COVID positive patients,” writes Business Insider, adding, “Instead, he’s given conflicting explanations and said it’s a phony Republican-made controversy.”
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has released a report confirming that Cuomo’s order put nursing home patients “at increased risk of harm.” The report cites hard data that reveal the state undercounted the nursing death toll, perhaps by 50% or more. “At some point, all of [Cuomo’s] tapdancing, finger-pointing, and brazen mischaracterization of indisputable facts needs to be called what it is: lying.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It will probably surprise no one to learn that “nursing home-gate” is not Andrew Cuomo’s first rodeo. That came in 2014 when the Moreland Commission, an ethics panel that the governor himself set up to investigate wrongdoing in the state government, extended its probe to the him and his office. Members of the ethics panel reported pressure from Cuomo’s aides to “pull back” subpoenas issued to groups close to the governor.
As for Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic in New York State, even as the plaudits were flowing, he was busy manipulating the data. In 2020, his order forcing COVID patients on nursing homes was scrubbed from the state government’s website. When the order found its way into the light of day in spite of his efforts to squelch it, he blamed the nursing homes for obeying it.
