Originally published July 29, 2020
https://www.queensjewishlink.com/index.php/opinion/2949-cuomo-uses-covid-to-extend-dictatorship
While the Chinese virus continues to spread throughout the world, the Governor of the hardest hit State in the Union is taking a brief hiatus from committing the COVID equivalent of germ warfare on nursing homes to extend his powers far beyond the abilities of his office. Andrew Cuomo has used his newfound celebrity status among the media elite to bring nearly every aspect of life in New York under his boot heel.
Like all good dictators, Cuomo has the benefit of a state media that succumbs to his every whim and a one-party system of government. Since the Democrats took majority power in the State Senate in the blue wave of 2018, there has been no check on Cuomo’s wildest impulses. If 2019 was the year that fulfilled Cuomo’s wish list, 2020 was the year when Cuomo was able to finally surpass the legislature completely. He was able to do this by using the pandemic and a sympathetic media to ram through every ridiculous whim he had.
By all accounts, Cuomo’s approval numbers should be in the toilet. New York has the most coronavirus deaths in the United States by a wide margin – twice as many as the next highest state, New Jersey. New York’s death count is over six times higher than that of the much-maligned Sweden. Cuomo is one of only five governors (all Democrats) to issue executive orders forcing nursing homes to receive COVID-positive patients. That order wasn’t reversed until early May. Cuomo also kept the subways opened and uncleaned until May, long after experts posited that the subway system was a primary vector of transmission.
Despite these massive failures, Cuomo enjoys a 60% approval rating amongst voters. This is because the media has been consistently gaslighting the public with the lie that Cuomo is a success and Republican governors around the country are the failures. The greatest offender is Cuomo’s own brother, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who has acted as Pravda for big bro Andrew. On May 20, Chris joked with Andrew about his brother’s nose size when taking a COVID test. At this point, deaths in New York hit over 18,000. Since then, deaths have doubled. That hasn’t stopped CNN anchor John King from asking Andrew Cuomo to give advice to governors, “most of them Republicans.” That hasn’t stopped Jimmy Fallon from fawning, “Governor Andrew Cuomo has shown such amazing leadership in helping guide the great State of New York and all of us New Yorkers through such a tough time.” So it’s no wonder that Cuomo has gotten such a swelled head that he lectures the rest of the country.
An NBC interview with Gabe Gutierrez began with the news that Andrew Cuomo violated his own travel ban by going down to Georgia (ironically only a few weeks after Charlie Daniels passed away) to tell a state with one-tenth his death rate how to combat this pandemic. (On a side note, the same Governor who endlessly touts how much Americans need to combat climate change took a private jet for this trip). The worst aspect of this interview was how NBC handled the executive order about nursing homes.
“But Cuomo has also faced controversy himself for ordering COVID patients to be transferred from hospitals to nursing homes,” said Gutierrez. Cuomo has the audacity to dispute this. “We looked at this factually. If you look at when the nursing home deaths happened, it has no correlation to that order. Where the spread came from were from the workers. There’s a chance that the virus may have come from visitors early on.” Cuomo provided no evidence that his greatest failure wasn’t his fault, nor did Gutierrez request any. However, when NBC replayed this interview the next morning on the Today show, that part of the segment was cut.
With wide latitude from the media to do whatever he wants and an ego eclipsed only by his own failures, Cuomo released a poster to self-aggrandizement that would make President Trump blush. He quotes himself, labels his response as “smart,” blames Trump, and celebrates LGBT Pride (for some unknown reason). He also has a giant mountain to show how bad the peak was, but for anyone with an attention span longer than five minutes, that curve was the opposite of the goals originally stated in March, which was to “flatten the curve.” Cuomo failed – miserably – and got away with parading his failures as successes.
This is why he feels comfortable going full dictator on bars in New York State. Cuomo released an order saying that bars must serve food, not just drinks. In response, bars started serving “Cuomo Crackers” and other made-up foods for a dollar or less. So Cuomo, in his infinite wisdom, redefined what food was. It included sandwiches, but not Buffalo wings. Apparently, Cuomo is not only the Conqueror of COVID, he’s the Arbiter of Appetizers.
Andrew Cuomo’s leadership over this past decade has been such a failure that the state has seen a massive exodus in recent years. His leadership over the past few months has seen the highest death rate in the country. Before the media continue to give him accolades that he doesn’t deserve, maybe they should look at the data. If they don’t, the voters definitely should.
Moshe Hill is a political analyst who has written for The Daily Wire, the Queens Jewish Link, The Jewish Link of New Jersey and JNS.org. He is regularly featured on ‘The Josh M Show’ podcast. Subscribe to aHillwithaview.com for more content from Moshe Hill. Like him on Facebook at facebook.com/ahillwithaview and follow him on Twitter @TheMoHill.
