17 June 2021: Opinion - Cuomo's Fictional Victory

Churchill: Andrew Cuomo has little to celebrate

After taking apart several claims Andrew M. Cuomo made during his "COVID Victory" speech, columnist Chris Churchill gets to the meat of the New York governor's COVID failures:

The governor was terribly wrong, which is OK. Nobody should expect that politicians won't make mistakes, especially when confronting a terror as unique and complex as the coronavirus. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, a little honesty about what happened doesn't seem too much to expect.

Instead, Cuomo spins a fictional, self-congratulatory narrative positing that New York is a coronavirus success story. It isn't.

More than 53,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19. That's easily the highest number of any state and only New Jersey has a higher per-capita rate. In a worldwide context, just a handful of countries (Peru, Hungary and Bosnia among them) have worse COVID-19 death rates.

Many of New York's COVID-19 deaths occurred among residents of nursing homes, and this week the New York State Bar Association issued a report finding that a controversial directive issued by the Cuomo administration contributed to the death toll and should have ended sooner.

But Cuomo has never conceded that forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients was a mistake. Instead, he waged a long and disgraceful effort to hide the full number of nursing home deaths. It's a cover-up that the FBI and U.S. attorney's office are investigating.

Churchill also finds a reason for Cuomo's "victory" speech:

It did, however, give a scandal-plagued governor one more chance to play the hero. It allowed him to distract attention from all the ongoing investigations, the possibility of impeachment — and also the news, broken by The New York Times, that Cuomo's inner circle continues to raise money for Joe Percoco, the disgraced gubernatorial pal.

In 2018, Joseph Percoco was convicted of soliciting over $315,000 in bribes in exchange for providing official favors from New York's state government during the periods he served as Executive Deputy Secretary to Governor Cuomo from 2012 to 2015. Cuomo's inner circle's continuing efforts to raise funds to benefit Percoco is a clear indication they don't believe the rule of law should apply to one of their own. Call it 'Il Privilegio del Cuomo'.

It would also help explain quite a lot of Governor Cuomo's conduct since all his scandals began coming to light.