Sometimes I’m so awesome, I even amaze myself!
All through the late Spring and into the Summer of 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was held up by the political elite class working through the mainstream media as the prime example of how to correctly manage the COVID pandemic. In fact, the entire time Cuomo was being held up as an example of brilliant leadership in handling the pandemic, he had a direct hand in engineering one of the worst COVID outbreaks in the entire country, one that may have killed more than 10,000 people. And he was far from the only governor who gave his state such inexplicable orders at that time, but more on that in a minute.
Cuomo signed an executive order on March 25, 2020, mandating that COVID infected people be admitted into the nursing homes. There was simply no excuse for this. When Cuomo made this order, we didn’t know everything we now know about the virus, but one thing we certainly did know was its devastating impact on the elderly with health issues. Yet Cuomo did it anyway, and his executive action resulted in thousands of deaths, at least 4,000 of which he tried to deliberately hide from NY state legislatures and from federal authorities.
This effusive praise of Cuomo at the time was in stark contrast to these same “news media” outlets relentlessly attacking other governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Texas’ Greg Abbott, and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem for not following the supposedly superior “Cuomo model” of handling COVID in their states.
One of these is not like the others…
In her recent appearance at the CPAC conference in Orlando, Florida, Governor Noem humorously recounted how NY’s Governor wanted to give her some helpful advice about how to handle the pandemic.
“Now many in the media, they criticized South Dakota’s approach. They labeled me as ill-informed, that I was reckless, and even a denier. Some even claimed that South Dakota was as bad as it gets anywhere in the world when it comes to COVID-19. That is a lie.
The media did all of this while simultaneously praising governors who issued lockdowns, who mandated masks and shut down businesses, applauding them as having taken the right steps to mitigate the spread of the virus.
At one point, I appeared on George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday Show. I don’t know if you watched that. No, you don’t? Shocker. He had just wrapped up a segment with New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, where he asked Cuomo to give me some advice on how to deal with COVID.
Instead of following Cuomo’s advice, Noem told the audience she was proud of the fact she never shut down a single business or closed even one church in her state. The South Dakota governor observed that it was not the virus itself that caused most of the damage to these United States as it was the draconian power-grabbing policies that many mayors and governors like Cuomo decided to impose on their fellow citizens.
As Noem mentioned in her speech, Governor Cuomo engaged in one of the most brazen in-your-face examples of an elite and media class-driven false narrative. He wrote a book extolling his own self-described virtues as a leader on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and was handed an Emmy Award.
Cuomo has been fruitlessly trying for some time now to keep the nursing home evidence from emerging, scoffing that the scandal is only the result of lies and smears by his critics. That got harder for him to do after the FBI opened its own investigation into the nursing home deaths. Since top Cuomo administration officials have already begun making public admissions about hiding/suppressing the true death counts from both state and federal authorities, it’s getting increasingly difficult for Cuomo to scoff that this is a fake scandal, which had been his standard answer to questions about it for the past several months.
By the way, you know you’re in real trouble when even a stalwart ally like CNN is forced to call you out. In an article on October 22, 2020, reporter Holmes Lybrand fact-checked a brazen lie from the NY governor:
"We never needed nursing home beds because we always had hospital beds," Cuomo told Finger Lakes News. "So, it just never happened in New York where we needed to say to a nursing home, 'We need you to take this person even though they're Covid-positive.' It never happened."
Facts First: Cuomo's assertion that "it never happened" is false. According to a New York State Department of Health report, "6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities" following Cuomo's mandate that nursing homes accept the readmission of Covid-positive patients from hospitals. Whether or not this was "needed," it did, in fact, happen.
Cuomo didn’t stop with bald-faced lies, either. The executive order Cuomo signed and implemented for his state on March 25 of last year was curiously removed from the New York Governor’s official website; no order appears there between March 23 and March 27, 2020.
This Growing Nursing Home Scandal Isn’t Limited to Cuomo
As I mentioned earlier, Cuomo was far from the only state governor who gave this kind of order. Several other blue-state governors also inexplicably made orders that forced COVID-infected people to be placed in nursing homes over a multitude of objections at the time.
And there was no excuse for it.
From left to right: Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Phil Murphy of New Jersey
We didn’t know everything we know now about the COVID-19 virus when Cuomo, Whitmer, Wolf, Newsom, and Murphy gave these fatal orders. But we knew enough. Everybody by that point knew how devastating the virus was for older adults, especially those with comorbidities. The kind of people nursing homes and eldercare facilities are full of.
There was no excuse for doing this, and the governors who did it cannot plead ignorance that they had no idea what would happen if COVID-positive people were placed in those nursing homes. And yet, despite very public opposition, each of these five governors loudly insisted on following through and implementing this fatal policy.
The Democratic Party Has to Shield These Governors from COVID Consequences
The fact is the 2020 Democratic presidential field demonstrated to all observers just how shallow the party’s bench is at the national level. Joe Biden turned out to be the best that the field had to offer. Ponder how sad that is. The best future Democratic candidates for President don’t reside in the House or the Senate; they’re currently getting executive experience running blue states as governors. So, the fact that almost a half-a-dozen of these Democratic blue-state governors marched in lockstep together, implementing almost exactly the same nursing home policies during the pandemic last year is a very real and present problem for the Democrats.
Another liability these five blue state governors face is the fallout from the extended lockdowns. While many red states opened long ago, blue state governors and mayors did massive damage to their own local economies by enforcing continued lockdowns. Democrats have tried to address the economic liability with the huge $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that just passed which contains what is essentially a massive bailout for these blue states.
When it comes to the nursing home scandals, Democrat power brokers are trying to quickly force Cuomo off the national stage by using sexual harassment claims from a legion of accusers. Cuomo needs to be gone before the nursing home scandal spreads like an out-of-control wildfire from New York and engulfs governors in other states, such as Whitmer in Michigan, Wolf in Pennsylvania, Murphy in New Jersey, and Newsom in California.
These powers-that-be currently driving the Democratic Party behind the scenes seem to think that by sacrificing the NY governor now through a #MeToo scandal, they can somehow shield these other governors they need for national races in the future from becoming enmeshed in the same nursing home scandals that entrapped Cuomo. New York’s governor certainly isn’t cooperating with this strategy at all and is vowing to fight to the end. The outcome of this seems inevitable, however.
Even after Cuomo is successfully forced from office, does this do anything to shield these other four governors who are in real political danger? I think it isn’t very likely. Even if Cuomo does soon leave office over these growing sexual harassment accusations, how does this stop the nursing home scandals from growing?
Whatever Democrats do, these four blue state governors are now in trouble. As the full truth has continued to emerge over the past few months about what these Democrat governors did to their vulnerable elderly populations, an increasing amount of public anger and activism has resulted. Republicans control the state legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which makes Governors Whitmer and Wolf very vulnerable to their own nursing home scandals.
Gavin Newsom is currently the target of a massive recall effort in California that could very well succeed. And Murphy in NJ is trying to stave off any accountability for what he did by blaming the staffs of the nursing homes in his state, which is an incredibly bad look.
As the Biden administration looks as increasingly frail and lost as the man at the top, Democrats looking ahead to 2022 and 2024 are suddenly nervous.
