Tuesday, August 10, 2021

THE WRONGEST RIGHT-WING PREDICTIONS ABOUT ANDREW CUOMO

Good riddance to bad rubbish:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday he will resign after a withering report from the state’s attorney general documented multiple accusations of sexual harassment against women.

The decision heads off his almost certain impeachment and conviction in the state Legislature....

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, will serve the rest of his term when the resignation becomes effective in 14 days. She will become the state's first female governor.
Some right-wingers (the New York Post's Michael Goodwin and National Review's Andrew McCarthy, for instance) correctly predicted that Cuomo wouldn't be able to hang on. But quite a few folks on the right insisted until the end that Cuomo would survive because Democrats protect Democrats -- even though a Democrat produced the report that doomed Cuomo, Democrats vowed to impeach him, and nearly every prominent Democrat in the state demanded his resignation, as did the Democratic president of the United States. Let's look at a few of those predictions.

I told you last week about Ben Shapiro, who said on Fox News a week ago:
The fact that [Attorney General] Letitia James, you know, laid out this enormous case about sexual harassment and sexual pressure and retaliatory work environment and all this, and then she said, "And I'm not going to do anything about it," kind of tells you how this is about to play out....

I actually think what you're about to see from Governor Cuomo is sort of a "wag the mask" situation, in which the Delta variant is used as an excuse for him to push new measures that are really authoritarian in nature, and then he'll be cheered by the press again for not being Ron DeSantis, because there really is a desire by a lot of people out there to be controlled from above....

This will be one news cycle and then gone.
Another Fox regular, Dan Bongino, said this on his radio show:
"I'm not convinced anything is going to happen to Andrew Cuomo at all," he said. "remember if there's even a whisper campaign like there was against Brett Kavanaugh – stories you knew were B.S. – they guy was like a choir boy — he's a Republican so he has to be taken apart."

"Andrew Cuomo is a protected class – he's a Democrat," the Fox News host continued. "He's like a ‘speckle-toothed owl’" he added, creating a mock name for rare species of wildlife often utilized to prevent commercial or agricultural activity on certain lands.
Townhall rage addict Kurt Schlichter tweeted this just after the AG's report appeared:



Kyle Smith of National Review predicted that criticism from the mayor of New York, a frequent Cuomo antagonist, was not a sign that Cuomo would leave. To the contrary:


Smith really bet the rent money on Cuomo's survival. His immediate response to the AG report was this National Review post:
Cuomo Won't Go

I’ve made bad predictions before, but I don’t see Andrew Cuomo showing himself to the door just because the state AG issued an exhaustive report confirming what we have known since last winter: Cuomo is a shameless serial sexual harasser. If he were a low-level executive at any reputable company, he’d be fired. If he were a CEO, he’d be fired. Alas, though, Cuomo can’t be fired, except via a glacial impeachment process. Which he will delay as long as he can in order to blunt the effect of today’s report. If you are sufficiently brazen — and there just isn’t anybody more brazen, not even Bill Clinton — you can just ignore the heat and tough it out.
Yesterday afternoon, Smith was defending this position:
I think Cuomo is so shameless that he will never resign unless he is guaranteed to be removed via impeachment. I see the walls closing in with such deliberate speed that they will not close this month and maybe not ever. I think the key figures are betting that if they can drag this thing out for four weeks or so, we’ll be into the fall, at which point they can argue, “Look, there’s an election a year away. Let’s let the voters decide.” Cuomo, should he just brazen it out, could be reelected by double digits next year. Do you really think he wants to let Bill de Blasio win?
(I don't know where Smith gets the idea that de Blasio could become governor -- he's not even popular in his own city. And why do people -- not just right-wingers -- insist that CEOs who sexually harass are invariably fired? They're the least likely harassers to be fired, or even caught.)

Twitchy collected some choice predictions under the headline "Don’t hold your breath for Andrew Cuomo to face any consequences after investigation concludes that he sexually harassed all those women."



(Shanker has written for National Review and The American Spectator.)

Is that our evil plan? We kick Anthony Weiner, Al Franken, and Eric Schneiderman to the curb, but we spare the executives? (I'm sure that would be news to Eliot Spitzer.)

Many of these people are fixated on the survival of Virginia governor Ralph Northam. But Northam's sin was the wearing of blackface in his early twenties, and he survived in large part because polls showed that African-Americans were willing to let it go. The only way the comparison makes sense is if you ignore the fact that serial sexual harassment and assault is a far worse offense. But to Republicans, the morality is irrelevant -- Democrats should be brought low, and that's all that matters.

Well, today that happened to a Democrat who deserved it -- and deserved it much more than Ralph Northam did. Democrats didn't protect Cuomo. If that's unimaginable to you, maybe you should reconsider your mental caricature of Democrats.
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