39 Comments
Aug 13, 2021Liked by Michael Tracey

Ah, classic New York politics. The best part about this whole thing is that Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, is doing the same thing to Cuomo that he did to Eliot Spitzer, the previous governor, when he was the Attorney General. If I was Letitia, I would keep a very close eye on my new Attorney General. You cannot make this stuff up kids!

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Reoccurring palace coups are yet another sign we are a nation in steep decline.

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Even the Praetorian Guard made better choices.

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We call that Kremlin watching.

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New York is a one party state.

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Your objectivity is appreciated. I disliked Cuomo always but when this story accelerated said many times “whatever happened to innocent till proven guilty?”

James has an agenda regarding running for governor and for letting women get away with immoral lies about men.

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A tearful tale of black trans victimhood should take care of that.

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> Less than 24 hours before Cuomo announced his resignation, an article I wrote on the whole ordeal for Tablet was published.

For future, can you share them here on Substack too? I don't have social media so I missed it when you posted.

Here's my breakdown of this Substack article:

> In part, Cuomo has himself to blame, for all the resentment he’s engendered over the years.

Agreed. Cuomo made his bed when he attacked Kavanaugh in the past or his empty rheotric about "believe all women". In fact, in 2018, "New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for the state’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to resign following allegations that he physically abused romantic partners. Cuomo, who is facing a primary challenge from Sex and the City star and activist Cynthia Nixon, has been quick to embrace the #MeToo movement. In March, he directed Scheiderman to investigate Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and his handling of a 2015 sexual assault allegation against disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.":

https://deadline.com/2018/05/ny-gov-andrew-cuomo-eric-schneiderman-resign-bombshell-report-1202384601/

I disagree with your:

> Oddly enough, the people furiously hammering this point tend to be the same people who’ve opposed most (if not all) COVID mitigation measures, and generally exhibit an attitude of dismissiveness toward COVID’s severity. Nonetheless, they’re extremely incensed about this particular issue of hospital administration policy.

Obviously there's political motives from many people on this topic but saying "opposed most COVID mitigation measures" and "dismissiveness toward COVID’s severity" is trying to conflate COVID’s severity towards healthy young audiences and the elderly. I was talking about this specific topic with a friend of mine last year back in March end. By then, we had figured out that COVID was bad for the elderly and the obese. But for young and healthy, it wasn't too bad. Life is filled with risks vs rewards and giving up freedoms and businesses made no sense for young healthy people.

We knew this so well that back in March 2020, the American Health Care Association told Cuomo, Wolf, Murphy, Whitmer etc to stop ordering infected patients into nursing homes. The governors ignored the AHCA and removed their own family from nursing homes while forcing others:

https://archive.is/bP8hz

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1191811

Saying "forcing covid patients into nursing homes killed elderly who were obviously the most susceptible" is not the same thing as being dismissive towards COVID in general. Tuberculosis for example killes 1.5 million people each year but we never had counters running on prime time TV on number of infected and dead. Add to this the flip flopping from politicians (including Fauci) on things like masks, social distancing etc, it's fairly obvious to understand where the "dismissiveness toward COVID’s severity" comes from. The boy can call wolf only so many times.

We are incensed about this nursing home scandal because it was such an obvious """mistake""" despite warnings that it simply cannot be a "mistake". And this whole Cuomo thing is an obvious distraction from the bigger elephant in the room which would implicate multiple governors - Cuomo, Wolf, Murphy, Whitmer. This clearly shows that the priorities of these people are not right - they don't actually care about any of these social issues. It's simply about power. Mean/offensive words are being treated harsher than killing people.

> His most stalwart political allies did not abandon him due to the nursing home matter

Because if they did, then Cuomo, Wolf, Murphy, Whitmer all would go down.

Charlotte Bennett has "womxn’s" in her profile. Other than the brutal take down you did in your article, any person who has womxn, their pronouns in their bio or uses words like latinx cannot be trusted. Also her lawyer Debra Katz is the MeToo equivalent of the ambulance chaser Ben Crump for BLM.

> This law enforcement official might have radically discarded the most basic notions of due process, but a political objective was achieved, and you can bet James will be reaping dividends ahead of the next New York gubernatorial election in 2022.

That AG is simply using this to prop herself up for her future gubernatorial run.

> In his resignation statement, Cuomo actually thanked his accusers — including Bennett — even as he largely disputed the thrust of their allegations. In any event, their tactics have been validated.

This is why Cuomo deserved this. Because he was spineless where it really mattered. This is where Trump despite all his flaws, stood up and fought back when the whole "grab them by the pussy" audio was leaked. Cuomo should have fought back and not resigned. He should have taken down everyone else with him. I hate him for what he did in the nursing homes and think he and other governors deserve prison for it. But Cuomo should not have resigned over this.

Also for what it's worth, Tucker Carlson did a similar expose questioning the whole Cuomo scandal. He also pointed out contradictory holes in the AG's report. One example was where the report claims that none of the senior staff reported feeling uncomfortable with sitting in Cuomo's lap. But the report still uses that against Cuomo.

So there's people on the right who are not 100% pro what happened with Cuomo here:

> "Tucker: If you don't think this is a conspiracy then you don’t know New York"

https://youtu.be/wZNng505VYM

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Cuomo also did the same to Governor Eliot Spitzer back in 2007 (Cuomo was AG then) and got him to resign:

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2018/12/19/andrew-cuomo-eliot-spitzer-feud-reignites

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I happened to be standing in the reception of a law firm office with Rudy Giuliani (when he was not insane) when the Spitzer resignation was on CNBC. He was talking and not watching the TV and I stopped him to point it out. He watched for 3 minutes, shocked (no prior knowledge) and the only words he said to me were "I can't believe the prostitute was a woman." True story.

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Tracey is writing some of the best non-partisan journalism on the internets.

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Aug 13, 2021Liked by Michael Tracey

Michael, you never fail to challenge my mind. Keep up the good work!

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Agreed. Upgraded to a paying subscriber based on this post.

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Cuomo had taken campaign money from hospital donors. Hospitals wanted to get covid patients out of hospitals. Cuomo repaid the hospital donors by granting them their wish, dumping sick people into nursing homes. Thousands of old people died unnecessarily. He gave immunity to nursing home administrators. He probably took money from nursing home donors too, I don't know. He cooked the books, and profited from lies. It was all known at the time and covered locally but ignored nationally. Liberal media and liberal elites needed an anti-Trump hero and they fabricated one out of thin air. When the shit finally hit the fan the liberal elites panicked, making up a (mostly) bullshit story about sexual abuse. Why? Because similar nursing home scandals happened in other democrat states like New Jersey and Michigan and others and a distraction was needed. Cuomo took the fall for sexual abuse (instead of a nursing home scandal) to save the other liberal governors from their own nursing home scandals. What a hero /s It's pretty fucked up. Everybody knows it, no one in liberal media talks about it. Fuck the mainstream media. Fuck the liberals.

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Despite what decrepit old suburban Boomer women and their becankled granddaughters believe, no one cares about their sacred tits. Biden demonstrated that Democrats are perfectly fine with cooch-poking old geezers as long as their political interests are being served. The real challenge for an investigator is finding out what Cuomo really did to raise the ire of the Democratic gerontocracy and their donor-owners. Hint, no one cares about old people either.

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They would not be willing to throw Cuomo under the bus this way if New York had any chance of electing a Republican in office. Republicans have ZERO chance in NY. So might as well use this opportunity to replace Cuomo with someone from the "oppressed" groups so any criticism of them can be deflected by labelling it racist/sexist/transphobic etc. Now Cuomo is neutered from running for president in 2024 against Kamala.

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founding

I used to think left wingers were unrealistic but well intended, overwrought but earnest, optimistic but ineffectual, well educated but kind of dumb, losers but oddly preferable to the winners.

Lefties have become very capable predators. You are so right, if there was a republican threat in the state of New York Cuomo would have been spared. These guys fight to win, no holds barred, bare knuckles.

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This is nee York politics as usual. Check out my other comment, Cuomo himself did the exact same thing to his governor when he was AG and then again to his competitor later on.

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founding

Yeah Elliot Spitzer, I saw that, poor guy paid five grand for a prostitute to have anonymity how did that go!

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Yup. It’s about making way for a mArgInaLized gRoUp with a seven or eight figure portfolio.

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I’m stealing “becankled granddaughters”.

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Aug 14, 2021Liked by Michael Tracey

Tish James pulled a Jim Comey here, and the news media happily went along for the ride.

James presented a laundry list of prosecutable crimes, and then said her job was done.

Comey presented a laundry list of prosecutable crimes, and then said, in effect, “But you know, never mind.”

By and large, in both cases, the news media acted as their stenographers and declined to do the tough work of looking skeptically into James’s and Comey’s motivations and the even tougher work of independently verifying those officials’ sources, conclusions and whether they left out any relevant facts.

That said, Cuomo still seems to be a pig and Hillary always seemed to be an entitled crook. And the media still seem to be too damn lazy to thoroughly check things out because — who knows? — that winding trail might lead to some facts that they would prefer not to report.

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Let's play connect the dots. Bennett was represented in the Hamilton College lawsuit by Debra Katz. Attorney Katz also represented Christine Blasey Ford concerning her specious sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing. Women such as these have weaponized their gender.

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The Dems, in the quest to stop and then oust Trump, created two monsters; #metoo and a politicized media. #metoo was supposedly intended to take down who were bad actors, but the reality is they wanted to have ten accusers against Trump to slander him, make him unclean in the public eyes. The problem is he didn't care, and the accusations were so shoddy that anyone supporting him simply rolled their eyes at it. But those torpedos were still in the water, looking for a viable target. Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, it didn't matter how guilty they were, only that they were a target of convenience.

A politicized media doesn't care what the truth is, as we have all seen in the last few years, but will attack its supposed enemies. And who will be the best foot soldiers for this? Well, the most progressive are often the ones with an ax to grind. The problem is you have to feed it red meat so to speak, or it will turn on you. As we just saw with Cuomo.

And you aren't the only one to point out issues with this, in fact, you are the third I've read today. Unherd, Reason, and I am sure there are others. But right now the R's have zero traction in any media outside of strict conservative sites, and in any case, are too busy laughing at the misfortunes of their enemies. But, outside the specific facts in this case, which you cover very well, I don't know if we should be afraid here. Yes, the AG was party to accusations without fact, something that is never good, but the reason Cuomo was dumped, as opposed to Biden, was that his party turned on him. And then he resigned, as opposed to fighting this. And a fight would have neutered the whole thing, nipped it at its roots.

And this is at the heart of our moral panic right now, and how to stop it. Just say no. Stop reacting, and don't cancel anyone.

By the way, if there had been a Republican waiting in the wings to take his slot, there is no way this would have happened. See Gov. Blackface McKlanhood in VA for an example of how that works.

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These assumptions that women are too selfless/traumatized to ever lie has to be put down at some point unless we want goodie proctor at governor.

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founding

I agree that’s a common pattern. If you even mention it you would be attacked.

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Nice work

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They're the ones who want to virtue signal about believing all women. This is just the result of their own politics.

Hopefully, he'll be prosecuted for his actual crimes concerning sending Covid patients to nursing homes for what ever insane reason he had. He's a menace to society.

It is very interesting how much he blabbed his fat mouth about alleged sexual assault allegations when it concerned other political figures, all the while, he was groping and making the women around him uncomfortable.

Democrats. It's like this every single time with those cretins.

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This is an excellent and dispassionate article on the topic, especially the background information, all of it ignored by the corporate press.

However, after your article on Medium, where "one falsehood is enough" on Kavanaugh, you saw fit to explain that that was enough to render him unfit for SCOTUS. This is not only strange, but completely antithetical for the wide range of improprieties (way worse than the gray area falsehood that tripped you up) you're allowing Cuomo in the early stage of your article. Especially that the Blasey Ford 'case' against Kavanaugh was ridiculous on its face. Since then, more recantations and admitting of lying have ensued.

It looks even more partisan, and unlike you, to then move heaven and earth to undermine the case against Cuomo. Are not the things mentioned in the first two paragraphs 'enough' to bounce Cuomo - behavior unfit to lead a major state of the crumbling union, as one falsehood, which sounds more like a misspeaking?

Lastly, and this is me on the spectrum talking, the 'severity' of COVID is vastly overstated. The people who hammer the nursing home point are justified. All one need do is look at places like Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, Iowa, and the CDC's own stats of COVID deaths by age you see that if you're under 70, without any major illnesses, COVID is not a risk, nor are the numbers worthy of a pandemic.

The same Corporate Media you so effectively eviscerate with your articles has, perhaps, colored your opinion as to its severity.

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founding

Michael, please give us your take on the southern border, illegal immigration and the current administration‘s betrayal of America.

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Kavanaugh was done at a national level with the Senate Democratic leadership and 90% of the press in the tank. It failed because nobody could be dredged up to help Ford. Then Avenatti "helped" and the game was up.

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