New York City, U.S. Andrew Mark Cuomo (/ˈkwoʊmoʊ/; Italian: [ˈkwɔːmo]; born December 6, 1957) is an American politician, author, and lawyer serving as the 56th governor of New York since 2011. ... In 2006, Cuomo was elected Attorney General of New York.
Sibling: Chris Cuomo,
Margaret Cuomo
Born: December 6, 1957, New York
City
Education: Fordham
University, Albany Law Sc...
Profession: Author, Lawyer,
Official, Politician
Andrew Cuomo might be a sociopath: a book
review
by Tiana
Lowe, Commentary Writer |
With the sole exception of potentially China, no other nation in the
world suffered as many per capita deaths from the novel coronavirus than the
state of New York. From Albany to Manhattan, no state or country was worse
served by its governance than the New Yorkers who suffered a COVID death rate
that killed one of every 1,000 residents of the Big Apple. Of course, you'd
hardly know this if you watched the media bend over backward to lionize Gov.
Andrew Cuomo for the hellscape of the past year. And you certainly wouldn't if
you took the career politician's deranged victory lap of a memoir about a
pandemic threatening to reshutter his state as fact.
In case you were wondering how Cuomo managed to crank out
some drivel for personal profit while dealing with no real end in sight for the
coronavirus, the explanation is simple: Cuomo published a deranged diary, one
with the tact and prose of a sociopath, and the promise of a politician so
cynical that he's preparing for an even more authoritarian rule to result from
his pandemic-justified tyranny.
Cuomo's coronavirus memoir, American
Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, should read as a mea
culpa by a narcissistic politician looking to salvage his future prospects.
Instead, it makes the cold-blooded Cuomo seem even more delusional than his
half a year of gaslighting his constituents has already proven him to be.
For starters, despite Cuomo's repeated insistence that he
wasn't covertly courting Joe Biden's campaign in the hopes of becoming his
running mate, the son of fellow famed New York Gov. Mario Cuomo makes the same
pseudo-self deprecating appeal to the public all wannabe presidents make. He
tries to prove that he wasn't actually that privileged because he was an
"outer-borough, middle-class guy." Cuomo spends many pages waxing
poetic about how his obsession with work leaves him with no free time, social life,
or even a girlfriend to replace the Kennedy who divorced him.
Just as he describes his personal life, Cuomo details his
political calculations with endless justifications and whataboutisms. When New
York confirms its first coronavirus case on March 1, Cuomo claims he knows in
his gut that there were prior cases in the state. But rather than follow the
lead of political neophyte Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, Albany wasn't
stockpiling PPE en masse. Cuomo saves his most shameless deflection of blame
for the two highly fatal unforced errors of his rule.
First is the matter of masks. In the journal entry of April
15, Cuomo writes, "By now I was convinced that masks were more effective
than the experts initially said." Presumably, Cuomo blames President Trump
for this, but given the clear eyes of his contemporaries, this is unacceptable.
We all know that Trump's supposed "experts," such as Anthony Fauci
and Jerome Adams, overtly lied about the outstanding role masks play in
preventing the transmission of an airborne respiratory disease. But recall, Los
Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered citizens visiting essential businesses to
wear masks more than a week before Cuomo's mask epiphany. Hell, I haven't taken
a biology class in nearly a decade, and I staked my reputation on the claim that yes,
you should wear a mask, on March 27, almost three weeks before Cuomo
conceded maybe blocking your spit and coughs would prevent new COVID cases. If
Cuomo couldn't Google the relevant studies about masks and bacteriophages
similar in size to coronavirus and confer with his own medical team about
masks, that's not on Trump. That's on him.
The only chapter in Cuomo's tale more disgusting than the
mask deflection is his outright lies about his nursing home policy. At the
start of the outbreak, Cuomo authored an executive order mandating that nursing
homes accept residents who tested positive for coronavirus, leading the virus
to run rampant in homes consisting of the population most vulnerable to its
fatal prospects. As a result, thousands of seniors died due to horrific policy,
and that number may even be in the five figures if Cuomo ever conceded to any
transparency in the matter.
And how does Cuomo address this? By blaming Republicans.
"By early spring, Republicans needed an offense to
distract from the narrative of their botched federal response — and they needed
it badly," Cuomo writes. "So they decided to attack Democratic
governors and blame them for nursing homes."
"[The Trump forces] needed to add a conspiracy, which
was that [seniors] died because of a bad state policy that ‘mandated and
directed’ that the nursing homes accept COVID-positive people, and these
COVID-positive people were the cause of the spread of the disease in the nursing
homes," Cuomo continued. "It was a lie. New York State never demanded
or directed that any nursing home accept a COVID-positive patient.”
The only liar here is Cuomo. Here is a copy of Cuomo's
murderous nursing home order shared by Janice Dean, who lost both of her
husband's parents in nursing homes under Cuomo's coronavirus call.
It’s not on his department
of health website, (it’s been scrubbed) but here it is! pic.twitter.com/8VLDKKC49F
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) October
14, 2020
Even with all of this, Cuomo may sound like your bargain
barrel politician. Yet somehow, even his supposedly humanizing moments manage
to paint him as so much worse than any of his colleagues along the coast.
When trying to defend his humiliating appearances on his
brother Chris's CNN show, Cuomo pleads that he only went on to get Trump's
attention and that trolling Trump's allies was justified because neither of
them pretended the interview was supposed to be objective.
"The show really did help get good information to
people, but it also did something else. It made people smile, and a smile can
be the best therapy," Cuomo says of palling around with his baby bro while
exterminating his state's seniors and businesses.
Responding to criticism that he exploited prison labor to
manufacture hand sanitizer in bulk, Cuomo simply notes that, "of course,
in New York you get criticized for everything."
Plenty of pages are dedicated to pushing back on the
president's frequent invocation of the "Fredo" nickname against
Chris.
"The Mafia stigma is one of the most painful and
vicious of anti-Italian American stereotypes," the super serious Cuomo
writes. Echoing his perverse DNC speech, Cuomo once again claims that the
coronavirus "is in many ways a symptom and not the illness." Nearly
33,000 dead New Yorkers and counting would beg to differ.
Cuomo is at his most sociopathic when he tries to convince
you that decision-making failures aside, he is actually very likable and very
cool.
"I am funny," Cuomo writes with the empathy of a
robot. "Many people don’t know that I’m funny. But I am. Actually, I am
very funny. But you’re not supposed to be too funny as a governor."
In case you read this review to find one shred of grace
this writer has for Cuomo, I'll leave you with this, the only section of
Cuomo's entire book that I truly think he both believes and is grounded in
objective reality. Here's the Love Gov.
"I am a controlling personality. At one time I opposed
that characterization because it has a negative implication. But you show me a
person who is not controlling, and I’ll show you a person who is probably not
highly successful."
Today's Listens |
|
Angela Weiss /AFP via Getty Images |
When New York became the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic this past spring, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefing became required viewing. Cuomo has a new book out, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic. In it, he describes how New York hurtled toward more than 33,000 deaths and how the state responded to the outbreak. Click here to listen or read the story. |
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