Author name: Gene Berardelli

Andrew Cuomo does not want you to read this article. He definitely does not want you to watch the above video. He would prefer that you forget his past and let his acts and omissions during the Coronavirus pandemic be lost to posterity, far away from today’s news cycle.

Andrew Cuomo wants you to forget because remembering his past dooms his future aspirations for a political comeback, which includes growing rumblings of a possible run to become the Mayor of New York City. So, he cannot have the horrible truth of his tenure during the pandemic get in the way of his ambition.

That is why Andrew Cuomo was so angry and combative while offering public testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic this week. That is why he railed against the Subcommittee’s 48-page memorandum detailing how Cuomo’s mismanagement of New York State’s response to COVID-19 cost the lives of over 15,000 seniors exposed to the deadly virus while in nursing homes. That is why he blustered at new findings re-confirming older findings from his own state that his administration played number games with the death toll of those seniors to cover-up his political complicity.  

It’s a story of political negligence powered by an insatiable political ambition that, if forgotten, may happen again.

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Here’s a little hometown trivia for you from my home state, which I often refer to as “The People’s Republic of New York”: the last time an Empire State governor was voted out of office in an election was Gov. Mario Cuomo when a relatively unknown state senator named George Pataki defeated him.

That happened in 1994.

Since then, thirty years of gubernatorial succession has been marred by controversy. Pataki chose not to run for a fourth term amid all-time low approval numbers. His successor, that “f***ing steamroller” Eliot Spitzer resigned as “Client No. 9” to an upscale call girl. Then, Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, withdrew from his campaign after news broke that his administration improperly intervened in a domestic violence case against one of his closest aides.

Which brings us to Andrew Cuomo. After winning a third term in 2018, Cuomo, who positioned himself as a foil to then-President Donald Trump, found the media spotlight during the pandemic. Indeed, many found reassurance in the routine that Gov. Cuomo’s daily televised briefings developed into in the spring of 2020. Meanwhile, others fell for Andrew’s appearances on his brother’s primetime show, dubbed by some as the “Cuomo Brothers Comedy Hour” on CNN). 

As Andrew Cuomo reveled in his new-found popularity, he parlayed his stewardship during the pandemic into financial opportunities, like his weird “flatten the curve” poster that he took much pride in creating, and his multi-million-dollar book deal.  He even won an Emmy, for goodness sakes.

On the surface, the summer of 2020 became the summer of the “Cuomosexual.”

Yet, underneath the bella figura Cuomo and his staff created for him laid a hubris beyond imagining that left a trail of failure, mismanagement, and, according to the opinion of many, death in his wake.

In the infancy of the pandemic in March of 2020, Cuomo and his Department of Health issued a flurry of advisories intended to guide hospitals and health care facilities. On March 25, 2020, Cuomo, having already withdrawn a nursing home’s ability to deny care to an incoming patient, further ordered that “[n]o resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID19.” Cuomo further ordered that “[nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested from COVID-19 prior to admission or re-admission.” 

That latter directive not only ran counter to federal guidelines issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), but also to common sense. What kind of a “leader” would mandate in a prohibition on testing for a novel virus during a pandemic?

The effect of this now-infamous advisory was tragic. Effectively, Cuomo forced the most vulnerable population of New Yorkers to be heavily exposed to a deadly virus. 

Oftentimes, it is not a poor political choice that does in a politician. It’s the cover-up that follows. Such is the case here, as Cuomo and his administration compounded his errors in judgment by lying about the true extent of the death toll that his Orders caused. In January of 2021, New York’s own attorney general, Letitia James, issued a report finding that Cuomo’s administration and his Department of Health undercounted nursing home resident deaths by approximately 50 percent.

But, even these tens of thousands of deaths were not enough to taint Cuomo and his legacy to the point of political radioactivity. Though damaged by the nursing home scandal, Cuomo persevered to the dismay of many. It was only after a boatload of claims of sexual harassment came to light thanks to a second report from AG James detailing inappropriate and unwanted advances of affection from Cuomo that he ultimately resigned in disgrace.

Gone was the praise and the fame. Gone was the book deal. And even the Emmy, which the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences stripped Cuomo of the day after he resigned.

Cuomo laid low for years to allow the shock and shame subside; to allow his disgrace to fall into the memory-hole. He began to re-emerge in 2023, taking media appearances again. He appeared on friendly media who seemingly chose to enable their disgraced friend. Friends like Anthony Scaramucci, who sat idly by as Cuomo painted himself as the victim of a conspiracy, allowing Cuomo to lash out at the families of loved ones lost during the pandemic who had since become politically engaged. “The attacks are just vicious. Vicious!: Cuomo proclaimed with a face of disgust.“ ‘You didn’t care about people in nursing homes.’ How dare you suggest such a vile thing?”

Cuomo’s re-emergence in the fall of 2023 coincided with whispers indicating to allies of his interest in running for New York City mayor if fellow Democrat Eric Adams would become entangled within the federal investigations that have once again cropped up in the news cycle.

It’s a shame for Cuomo that those “vile” family members never relented in spreading the truth about him. The perseverance of organizations like Voices for Seniors and other notable personalities like Fox News’s Janice Dean culminated into the release of the Subcommittee’s memo, which detailed just how deep Cuomo and his staff’s cover-up of their mismanagement went. It turns out that Cuomo knew that nursing homes presented a real risk of infection, calling it a “nightmare” scenario. Yet, his administration still issued that March 25 Order, thus perpetuating that nightmare scenario.

To this day, even Cuomo wants us to believe he doesn’t know who signed off on the March 25 order; other than, according to his sworn testimony, telling you it was not him.  Curiously, that viewpoint runs counter to other Cuomo staffers, including his own Health Commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, who testified that during the pandemic, “everything ended up having to go through the Governor’s Office.”

With the insurmountable weight of the Subcommittee’s findings brought to bear, Cuomo remained stubbornly insolent, even refusing to apologize to the gathered audience of those “vile” family members in attendance. Cuomo dismissed such demands as a political stunt.

It is in those moments where Cuomo refused to capitulate that he let his mask slip and reveal his true nature; that he is, at his core, an arrogant, audacious and irredeemable creature of political opportunism.  No amount of re-packaging or political window dressing will ever change him.

Seeing this true nature, Rep. Elise Stefanik boldly proclaimed that during a shouting match with Cuomo that “You will never hold elected office again.”  I wish I had Stefanik’s confidence, as the voting populace in “The People’s Republic of” New York were fooled once by Cuomo.

Which is why it is so important that we never forget what he did; so we never allow him the opportunity to do anything like that again.

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Gene Berardelli is a street-smart New York-based trial attorney with a successful track record representing conservative candidates and a solid reputation as an award-winning podcaster and as the award-winning author of the Amazon bestseller Schnooks, Crooks, Liars & Scoundrels: A Field Guide to Identifying Political Buffoons. He currently hosts Buffoon of the Week! whcih is available on YouTube, Rumble and other video-hosting platforms, featuring daily original content which seek to find the dumbest political newsmakers each week.

 

With Labor Day in the rear-view mirror, the 2024 election cycle is sure to heat up, and campaign-related announcements are sure to be a frequent occurrence. Some will be meaningful. Others will have zero value.

Clearly falling into the latter was former Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s endorsement of the Democratic Party’s installed designee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Cheney did not join Harris or her team on a stage or take in the adulation of a raucous crowd living on joy and vibes at a campaign rally. Instead, Cheney’s endorsement came at a very low-key event hosted by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Cheney’s endorsement comes as no surprise to political observers, given her stewardship of the January 6^th Select Committee and her outspoken animus towards her own party’s duly elected nominee, former President Donald Trump:

 “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Cheney said. 

The endorsement represents a complete 180-degree turnaround for Cheney,  who is on record in tweets calling Harris a “radical liberal” whose positions are to the left of the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who would “recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle” during the so-called “Summer of Love” from 2020. Cheney repeats those sentiments in a Fox News that has recently re-surfaced since Cheney’s endorsement:

Liz Cheney says Kamala Harris is a “radical liberal.”@Liz_Cheney has such TDS that she’s now pledged to vote for someone who goes against everything she once said she stood for.

Cheney is just an awful person. But you already know that.

🎥 @TrumpWarRoom https://t.co/VrnUWM9uSj pic.twitter.com/I5dR2mGmog

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) September 4, 2024

Notice how Cheney framed her endorsement. She did not laud Harris’s abilities to govern. She did not endorse Harris’s policy positions or plans (probably because the Harris campaign has largely communicated in platitudes.) She certainly did not endorse Harris’s values, which she claimed in a CNN interview with Dana Bash have not changed, despite her shifting her positions based upon the political winds of the say. The political hypocrisy is palpable.

 Cheney’s endorsement is mere the furtherance of her vendetta against Trump.  A vendetta which started from opportunism after January 6, 2021. A vendetta which grew after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handpicked Cheney to serve on that kangaroo court that was the January 6^th Select Committee. And a vendetta that rendered Cheney a political afterthought when she was soundly defeated in the 2022 Republic primary by her successor Harriet Hageman.

Cheney’s endorsement mirrors much of the 2020 strategy which resulted in President Joe Biden’s election: don’t vote for Harris, vote against Trump. It’s Cheney’s wishy-washy way of feigning her conservative bona fides while jumping ship from a Republican party that has cast her aside in favor of more credible, good-faith conservatives like Hageman.

One would be hard pressed to find a better example of a politician being a “Republican in Name Only,” a term reserves for the old guard of the Republican Party whose moment passed the moment Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016.

Apparently, Cheney seems to believe that her endorsement, such that it is in her diminished capacity within her own party, holds value for the Harris team in bringing in cross-over votes. But the political reality of her situation would tend to indicate this to be nothing more than vanity. In August of 2022, polling found that 2 out of every 3 Republicans held a negative view of Cheney. Other polling from around the same time found that 3 in 5 Democrats favorably viewed Cheney.

That translates into very little needle movement in favor of Harris. Essentially, Cheney’s endorsement is merely preaching to the choir.

Chalk up Cheney’s endorsement to the political equivalent of the shocking news that water is wet, and that the sky is blue. It’s political narcissism; an attempt at relevancy in a news cycle dominated by the election. If Cheney’s opinion had value, the Harris campaign would have Liz Cheney thrust into the national spotlight. Instead, Cheney is relegated to a policy forum, earning coverage from confirmation biased media making more of her statement than its actual weight.

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Gene Berardelli is a street-smart New York-based trial attorney with a successful track record representing conservative candidates and a solid reputation as an award-winning podcaster and as the award-winning author of the Amazon bestseller Schnooks, Crooks, Liars & Scoundrels: A Field Guide to Identifying Political Buffoons. He currently hosts Buffoon of the Week! on YouTube and Rumble, featuring daily original content which seek to find the dumbest political newsmakers each week.