EVEN THE RIGHT-WING HACKS ARE BECOMING CONSPIRATORIAL LUNATICS NOW

Lisa Schiffren used to be a garden-variety GOP hack, best known as the ghostwriter of a speech in which then-vice president Dan Quayle effectively blamed unwed motherhood in America on Murphy Brown, a sitcom character who had a baby out of wedlock. Schiffren is also known for a wince-inducing 2003 Wall Street Journal column in which she and a group of friends proclaimed flightsuit-wearing George W. Bush a stud ( "Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!"). But she wasn't the only Republican talking this way at the time, although most of the sex talk at the time centered on Donald Rumsfeld. Schiffren's opinions were bad, but she wasn't crazy.

Now she's crazy.

Writing for the MAGA site American Greatness -- maybe there's something in the water there -- Schiffren argues that, yes, Andrew Cuomo has been caught harassing and intimidating many women, and yes, Democrats might force him out of office -- but that's all part of the DemonRAT Party's sinister plan.

The national outrage at Cuomo’s handsiness and bullying—from feminists, Democratic officials, and others who have ignored Joe and Hunter’s actual criminal sexual depravity—and the expiation of sin to follow as he leaves the scene, has made it unlikely that Cuomo will ever face justice for the deliberate murder of roughly 15,000 seniors in New York nursing homes. That is a far more serious charge.

The state assembly's judiciary committee is looking into the nursing home story as well as Cuomo's sexual harassment as it considers impeachment charges, but that doesn't fit Schiffren's narrative.

But that's not the crazy part. The crazy part starts here:

Were that case to be unraveled, with evidence, in a court of law or even in a real newspaper, many people besides Cuomo would be in deep trouble. Particularly hard hit would be those for whom he acted in pursuit of unseating Donald Trump in the coming election. So that could not be allowed to happen.

Why do I think those deaths of elderly people in nursing homes were deliberate, and not just incompetence or lack of preparedness, as he has argued? Timing.

Yes, she thinks Cuomo -- and other Democrats -- wanted New Yorkers to die from COVID in nursing homes. Why? Let her explain.

In March, 2020, as COVID became an issue, the biggest problem associated with it was the lines at New York City-funded hospitals, and the start of a rising death toll. But most states still had zero or only a handful of cases. There were far too few deaths to justify shutting down businesses or schools.

To use the crisis as a means to unseat Donald Trump, as the Democrats were hell-bent on doing, required drama, and action.

Schiffren believes Cuomo saw what was going on with sick nursing home patients and thought, If we kill enough of these old people, we'll start a national crisis and defeat Trump in November. Boo-ya! Let's do it! (Your right-wing relatives probably believe this, too.) Schiffren also seems to believe that there wouldn't have been a shutdown, or a crisis of any kind, without this act of mass murder.

It is hard to imagine that this was an accident. Even as the death toll began skyrocketing, Cuomo refused to reconsider the policy.

Four other Democratic governors followed suit, using the same tactic, and thousands more in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California subsequently died, allowing Democrats to ramp up the fear that justified a year-long shutdown of work, schools, the economy, and allowed for election practices that enabled mass cheating.

Yup -- they did it deliberately so we'd have a cratering economy and mail-in ballots! The fiends!

In Albany, the coverup kicked in in real time. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides had rewritten a state Health Department report on nursing home fatalities to hide the number of actual deaths, just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write his book.”

I'm puzzled by this. If Cuomo was killing all these old people deliberately in order to make Trump look bad, wouldn't he want the public to know the death toll? And if he was cooking the books, shouldn't he have been exaggerating the death toll? And shouldn't his book have been How I tried to save New Yorkers' lives but was thwarted by Donald Trump?

But that's not the only evil Democrat conspiracy Schiffren ees. Cuomo's likely defenstration, if it happens, is also a conspiracy.

Biden and the cabal have just cleared the stage of their most compelling competition in 2024.

Odd that Democrats didn't think of this when many party members were despairing of their nominee in the spring of 2020, a time when Cuomo was at the peak of his popularity. Now they're worried about Cuomo?

Schiffren adds, tastefully:

(That need was not anticipated back when everyone expected Biden to die early, so Kamala could take over. But Kamala is such a disaster that even they see she has to go.)

Damn Biden -- how dare he continue to be sane and healthy!

I suppose the first conspiracy theory -- that Cuomo mass-murdered old people so he could blame the deaths on Trump (and then, for some reason, covered up the deaths) -- isn't very different from what many Democrats think Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are doing now. I'm not that cynical. Especially in an era when vaccines are available, I think these Republican governors and other members of their party have persuaded themselves that all their justifications for rejecting public health measures -- that restrictions on business hurt the economy and throw people out of work, that the sick and dying made free choices, that individual freedom matters more than society -- exonerate them. Also, their right-wing billionaire paymasters want the country opened up, and their voters want them to own the libs, even at great personal risk to themselves. I think anti-public-health GOP governors are indifferent to the suffering; I think they'd rather be where DeSantis thought he was this past spring. (See, I opened my state up early and nothing terrible happened. Elect me president!)

I'm struggling to understand why Cuomo would feel the need to goose the statistics, given that there were hospitals full of sick and dying people who weren't nursing home dwellers in New York City and elsewhere. And then I don't understand why he chose to cover up the very crimes he wanted to use to frame Trump. But I'm not as crazy as Lisa Schiffren.