The lionization of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been a sight to behold. Despite presiding over one of the worst responses in the world to coronavirus, the media have treated him as a success story. When he’s not being thrown softballs by his brother on CNN, he’s going on the Sunday shows to be fluffed by sycophants. Meanwhile, these same media outlets trash states like Florida that have had far better results than the myriad of northeastern blue enclaves.

How much better? This much better.

Total hospitalizations in NYC alone due to CV-19: 54,345

Florida, with 3 times the population of NYV, reports 13,119 hospitalizations

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) June 22, 2020

The irony of Cuomo accusing other governors of “killing” people when his policies are directly linked to thousands of dead citizens in New York should be lost on no one. This is a person who forced nursing homes to take coronavirus infected patients by dictate of law. That predictably led to massive outbreaks among the country’s most vulnerable populations. Even still, his state is attempting to hide the true numbers by hiding behind the “died in facility” designation, though that cultivated number alone is still massive. But when you count those infected at nursing homes but that later died at the hospital, the number of dead is likely in the tens of thousands.

Does Cuomo take any responsibility for his failures though? Of course not. Instead, he’s blaming Donald Trump.

RUHLE: “Do you take responsibility for that order and the role it may have played in those deaths?”

CUOMO: “Republicans are playing politics… The federal government missed the boat and never told us this virus was coming from Europe and not from China”
pic.twitter.com/s0d0xESoxc

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 22, 2020

Good for Ruhle for actually asking this question, something CNN couldn’t get around to in a nine minute interview with Cuomo this past weekend. Regardless, Cuomo’s answer is as nonsensical as his overall response to the virus. The virus did come from China. That’s where it started. By the time the United States was already on high alert (but still had few cases), places like Italy were already disaster areas. The idea that Cuomo needed big daddy federal government to tell him the virus was “coming from Europe” is ludicrous and an excuse so weak that you’d expect it to come from a child. Anyone could have turned on their TV at the time and known the virus was spreading throughout Europe.

Worse, the federal government did warn of spread from Europe to America in early March by default when they closed travel down between the two continents. What was Cuomo doing? Threatening to sue states that quarantined New Yorkers while the mayor of his largest city was telling people to go about their lives. That’s on Cuomo, not the federal government.

Cuomo has shown himself to be absolutely shameless. Behind him are a trail of media figures and Democrat politicians who have pretended his tenure has been anything but an abject disaster. The deaths of thousands in New York did not just happen. Most of them were preventable with even a semblance of competent leadership. Cuomo hasn’t provided that and has instead directly caused much of a carnage with his decisions. He needs to be held accountable, not fawned over.