Andrew Cuomo's Recent Comments on Nursing Home Scandal Should Have Even His Supporters Seething

AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey
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New York Gov, Andrew Cuomo holds his face mask while talking to the media at the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, March 26, 2020. Gov. Cuomo rang the opening bell as the trading floor partially reopened during the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
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Yesterday, I wrote about the appallingly chummy interview ABC News’s Amy Robach conducted with NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) earlier this week.

Robach threw him softball after softball, and at one point gushed about how he had been dubbed “the Luv Guv” by the New York Post. She also mentioned how Chelsea Handler wrote him “a love letter essay.” She did not ask one question – not one – on his nursing home executive order from March that some are blaming for the deaths of thousands of senior citizens in nursing homes and other assisted living facilities in New York.

But while Robach clearly wasn’t interested in asking any questions that didn’t involve plumping Cuomo’s pillow beforehand, Albany, New York’s WAMC public radio did manage to get one serious question in about the nursing home scandal during their otherwise equally softballish-interview Thursday with New York’s so-called “Luv Guv.” His answer was as despicable as it was tone deaf:

“Do you ever change your mind, governor, about anything based on what these reporters are saying?” host Alan Chartock asked Cuomo. “I think about the nursing home situation, you got a lot of criticism from them, they asked one question after another. Is there anything you could point to in which you say ‘Ok, they really sort of have convinced me I’m on the wrong track here.’”

“No,” Cuomo replied. “The nursing home is an unfortunate situation on two levels. No. 1, people in nursing homes died. The nursing home is pure politics, the Republicans in Congress, they think there’s a vulnerability.”

“The nursing home thing it’s just all politics and it’s, frankly, the New York Post, and [columnist Michael] Goodwin, this is their way of defending Trump,” Cuomo continued.

[…]

“They don’t want to talk about what the federal government did on COVID. So they want to attack the Democrats for nursing home deaths. It’s the same M.O., just distract, you know create a shiny object to take attention off what they don’t want you to focus on,” Cuomo said Thursday. “We had the worst case in the United States because the federal government had no idea what was going on. Where was the CDC? And where was the NIH? And where was everybody?”

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That’s just a disgraceful answer. This is not a “shiny object” for anyone. There are a LOT of questions being raised about the nursing home/assisted living policies in a lot of states, not just New York. And the questions are not just being raised by Republicans. Democrats are asking them, too. But the latter are doing so in a very cautious way so as to avoid looking like they are criticizing their own side for how poorly their colleagues managed the Wuhan virus outbreaks in their respective states.

There are going to be lawsuits and investigations over this issue at the state level, and Cuomo is not going to come out smelling like a rose when all is said and done. Even the left-wing apologists at Politifact aren’t buying his excuses on the nursing home deaths.

What happened, what went wrong, etc. is not about politics to anyone other than Andrew Cuomo, who has been treated like a rockstar throughout the crisis by most in the mainstream media and those in the entertainment industry. He’s been given the kid-gloves treatment in spite of his gross mismanagement of the crisis, which has been documented in detail by normally reliably left-wing outlets like the New York Times, and by left-leaning groups like ProPublica. Because he has faced so few hard-hitting questions about his handling of the crisis he feels like he can continue to get away with either blaming everyone but himself or saying they are much ado about nothing.

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His failures, and the fact that they enabled the spread of the virus not just across his state but all over the country, are inarguable. Yet he keeps characterizing the criticism as being nothing more than about politics. Perhaps he should look in the eyes of the people like Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean who lost loved ones thanks to his March 25th executive order on nursing homes and tell them this is all political and nothing more?

Indeed.

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