If you kill a few thousand senior citizens through negligent policymaking and subsequently try to cover it up, that’s considered politically survivable in the current climate. Alleged inappropriate behavior around staffers, however, is a death sentence.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been accused of all these things. While his sexual misconduct and egregious mishandling of COVID-19 are both heinous, they are not equally so. It should not be controversial to assert killing the elderly through incompetence is far more depraved than anything the New York Attorney General has accused the governor of doing to his subordinates.
The public response from the media is currently flipping the moral weight of the two wrongs.
Only after allegations of sexual misconduct against Cuomo emerged last fall did New York State Democrats launch an impeachment inquiry against him, nearly a year after his disastrous public health order forced nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients. Today’s formal accusations of sexual harassment from the attorney general seem to have reignited calls for impeachment. His nursing home scandals, meanwhile, continue to go unmentioned.
Based on the reactions, it would appear as if many view sexual harassment as more repugnant than negligent homicide. Thousands of people lost parents and grandparents due to Cuomo’s regime. Everything he has been accused of by his current and former employees, while terrible, can’t top that.
Cuomo’s administration mandated nursing homes readmit residents who had been hospitalized with COVID-19. It barred these facilities from testing returning patients, or new ones, for the coronavirus. Undoubtedly, this introduced the infection into some of the most vulnerable populations, contributing heavily to the disgraceful death toll accrued within New York’s nursing homes. Cuomo, like everyone else, knew the elderly were particularly susceptible to the virus but still approved policies that unnecessarily endangered them.
After those deaths inevitably occurred, Cuomo and his lackeys actively covered them up, going as far as to rewrite state documents to obfuscate the true number of deaths in nursing homes. All this verifiably happened and is largely undisputed.
Now, Cuomo is accused of making sexually charged comments, giving unwanted kisses, and groping a woman, among other things. Utterly disgusting as all these may be, it is odd to see this will be what undoes his career.
His flagrant disregard for human life wasn’t enough to push him out of polite society, but at least he will face some kind of reckoning.
