June 20, 2020

Callous contempt: The crisis of blue-state one-party Democrat goverance

by Monica Showalter
AmericanThinker.com

How's this for a disgusting evasion of responsibility?

Fox News reports:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday again defended his administration's now-scrapped nursing home policy that critics say contributed to thousands of coronavirus deaths, slamming the controversy as "a shiny object" and "pure politics."

Cuomo's comments came during an interview on New York's WAMC-AM on Thursday. He was asked about the criticism and whether he acknowledged the policy was "on the wrong track."

"No," the Democratic governor responded. "The nursing home is an unfortunate situation on two levels. Number 1, people in nursing homes died. The nursing home [controversy] is pure politics, the Republicans in Congress, they think there's a vulnerability."

He added: "The nursing home thing it's just all politics."

Cuomo went on to say the criticism is just a way to deflect criticism from the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He added: "We had the worse case in the United States because the federal government had no idea what was going on. Where was the CDC? And where was the NIH? And where was everybody?"

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called the mass COVID-19 deaths in New York's nursing homes "the nursing home thing" and "a shiny object" being played with for political purposes by his opponents instead of the raw, rank, killing scandal that caused more than 10,000 people to lose their lives in nursing homes.  These patients were not just unprotected, but explicitly put in harm's way on his orders.

It doesn't take a genius to know that in an era when nursing home patients were being blocked off from visits by their loved ones to protect them from potential coronavirus exposure, that putting live, COVID-19-positive patients right there in their closed living quarters where no one could get out was a death sentence to thousands — who ended up dying terrified and alone.  That was done at his order on March 25 on "non-discrimination" grounds, even as President Trump sent a hospital ship to New York harbor fully ready to take care of them.

Every last claim he makes about this fiasco is refuted by facts.  Cuomo insisted that those nursing homes take those patients; he threatened to pull their certifications if they didn't; he forbade them from testing those incoming COVID-19 patients; and the hospitals sent the patients in, complete with boxes full of body bags for the inevitable deaths to follow.  Phone calls to the Cuomo's office begging for a change of course went unanswered.  And until the proof of that order got out, Cuomo was denying the whole thing and blaming "greedy" nursing homes for taking the COVID patients.  Now he's claiming, falsely, that he was following the CDC, which he claims, was somehow absent, even though the rest of us could get it on our television sets every night.

Today, Cuomo says he wouldn't place his own mother in a nursing home.  With his brand of leadership in the state, no one should.

Four other governors also ordered nursing homes to seed themselves with COVID-19 patients — California's Gavin Newsom, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf, and New Jersey's Phil Murphy.  And as a result, most nursing home deaths, often by very large percentages, made up the bulk of the COVID-19 deaths.  What do these places have in common?  That's right: they are all one-party blue states with no political competition.  That's worth noting — that's worth talking about — because somehow, none of these catastrophes happened in red states.

Why did these so-called put-people-first leftist governors do this?  Two things spring to mind on first pass: greed for federal dollars, which would come of every COVID-19 death, higher than for other causes — which is why most anything was characterized as a COVID death — and getting rid of old people, whose health costs were expensive, at a time of strapped state budgets as the tax base fled and bureaucrats were hired, along with big dreams of greenie spending boondoggles. 

Both reasons say a lot about blue-state rule for hurling old people to the throes of death by disease — and why such deaths never occurred in red states, where elderly people were viewed as human beings instead of sinkhole costs and federal dollar opportunities.

A third reason was likely to Get Trump.  With the media in their tree, it's easy to spread a narrative that it's all Trump's fault from this sort of fiasco.  Their mess, his blame, doing their part to oust a hated president up for re-election.

It certainly would explain the irrational lockdowns that were put in place by blue-state Democratic governors, all of it selective, all of it intended to kill the economy, which of course was Trump's trump card.  Keep the economy bad, and watch them vote for Democrats was the logic. 

All of the deep blue governors opted to kill their economies this way, and they did it with little carveout for their favorites. Gov. Murphy of New Jersey made selective choices about which tulip farms could be viewed. Gov. Newsom of California made decisions to economically punish conservative areas to keep them in lockdown over beach activity, the least likely place for anyone to catch COVID-19 due to the high wind exposure. Some counties were punished, and some were not, even though they were all crowding the beaches. It's just funny that the redder counties were punished most. Whitmer too made grotesque decisions to squeeze her own state's economy - a one-size fits all lockdown model for the whole state even though the bulk of the problem was in deep blue Detroit.

"Can I buy you a hot dog," she asked, when a distraught unemployed worker told her to please free the economy. Let them eat hot dogs.

The economy remained locked down and too bad about the unemployed. There also was her husband's a bid to jump the queue on opening up, calling to get boat docking service ahead of the others in order to enjoy the water while everyone else was still waiting to get work.

This was far from the only crisis of Democrat governance, it got worse with the George Floyd riots, where these governors continued with the economic ruin theme by letting mobs run wild, looting and destroying small businesses' livelihoods, undercutting and even demonizing the cops (deep blue Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti declared his city's cops "killers"). Deep blue cities are now seeing police walkouts and sickouts as cops continue to get demonized and calls go out, endorsed by these officials, to "'defund the police.' (except for the cops who do my security.)

The country is indeed in a crisis, and it need never have happened. It's entirely the doing of blue state governors and mayors, and its ultimate aim is to Get Trump. We now see what these people are made of with this crisis. Democrats rule like this, and the crisis now seen is a Democrat crisis. Their decisions, their show. This is all theirs, blame as they President Trump.

Every last one of them should be exposed, hectored, and eventually thrown out by voters.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/callous_contempt_the_crisis_of_bluestate_oneparty_democrat_goverance.html

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