ProPublica has published a shocking report about Andrew Cuomo’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis in New York State:
On April 3, Stephanie Gilmore, a 34-year-old nurse working at the Diamond Hill nursing home in Troy, New York, was summoned to a supervisor’s office. The home’s administrator and nursing director were there to relay some distressing news.
Gilmore said they told her that a resident in the home had recently gone to the hospital, where she tested positive for COVID-19. The resident was set to return to Diamond Hill, making her the first confirmed COVID-19 case at the 120-bed facility north of Albany.
The risks to the home’s staff and other residents were obvious: The virus was ravaging nursing homes across the country.
But the week before, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his health commissioner, Howard Zucker, had all but made such discharges mandatory. If a hospital determined a patient who needed nursing home care was medically stable, the home had to accept them, even if they had been treated for COVID-19. Moreover, the nursing home could not test any such prospective residents — those treated for COVID-19 or those hospitalized for other reasons — to see if they were newly infected or perhaps still contagious despite their treatment. It was all laid out in a formal order, effective March 25. New York was the only state in the nation that barred testing of those being placed or returning to nursing homes.
In the weeks that followed the March 25 order, COVID-19 tore through New York state’s nursing facilities, killing more than 6,000 people — about 6% of its more than 100,000 nursing home residents. In all, as many as 4,500 COVID-19 infected patients were sent to nursing homes across the state, according to a count conducted by The Associated Press.
The thing is, that report was posted on June 16, 2020. Five months later, it was announced that Cuomo would receive an Emmy Award “in recognition of his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”
That America’s great pandemic hero was actually botching the crisis horribly was already well known. And now it’s looking like his mistreatment of women was an open secret, too:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) reporter and biographer Michael Shnayerson on Saturday alleged that Cuomo has has a history of "predatory behavior" that has been "evident for years."
In a lengthy article published in Vanity Fair on Saturday afternoon, Shnayerson wrote that the most recent allegations of sexual misconduct and mistreatment of the press against Cuomo are consistent with the New York governor's "checkered past."
Shnayerson laid out in the piece that Cuomo had a tense, at times abusive relationship with his ex-wife, strong-armed the press and managed his staff by pitting top aides against one another.
Shnayerson alleged that Cuomo's ex-wife, Kerry Kennedy — part of the prominent Kennedy political family — slept in a locked bathroom on more than one occasion, according to a source close to the family. The source also recounted "instance of physical abuse" by Cuomo against Kennedy.
“I’ve been a human rights activist, and for women who have abusive husbands,” Kerry reportedly told her friend, “and here I am enduring this abuse.”
So, if you’re only now coming to the realization that this guy might have been really terrible at his job and at being a decent human being, better late than never. I guess.
But even that wording lets Cuomo’s media cheerleaders off the hook. Blinded by their (completely justified) loathing of Trump, they desperately wanted a good guy as a contrast, and Cuomo - Governor of the very state where many of these big media outlets are headquartered - fit the bill.
They knew this guy was trouble, but like the old lady letting the poisonous snake stay at her house, they invited him in anyway. I hate posting a Tucker Carlson clip as much as I’m sure you hate watching it, but this supercut is brutal:
Of course, it’s disingenuous for Carlson, and other professional Trump bootlickers, to cry foul about Andrew Cuomo now. Trump was worse than Cuomo by almost any measure. But those of us who never liked either of these guys are wondering what took everyone so long.
As a standard, “not as bad as Trump and Republicans” sets the bar awfully low.
Let’s make two things very clear about the great Dr. Seuss culture was of 2021. First, it’s downright embarrassing to watch the likes of Ted Cruz trying to make this the most important history in the world while we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. And even if you think “cancel culture” is a problem, Republicans are among its worst perpetrators.
Second: much of the academic work that’s turned woke opinion against America’s most beloved children’s author is, to use a precise scientific term, completely bugfuck insane.
Cathy Young, who deserves an award for wading through this pseudo-scholarly babble (maybe we can give her Andrew Cuomo’s Emmy) points out that the emperor has no clothes. Or, that the Cat has no Hat.
On March 3, 2017, Katie Ishizuka, an activist educator and founder/director of something called The Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, published an article on Blavity, a website for black millennials, titled “Why My ‘Read Across America Day’ Was Different: The Racist History of Dr. Seuss.” She later described the piece as “a call to action for the National Education Association (NEA) to reconsider what it means to celebrate Dr. Seuss, and remove him as both the face, and focus of, their annual Read Across America Day.” (The NEA first launched Read Across America Day in 1998 as a literacy promotion event and a celebration of Dr. Seuss, coinciding with his birthday.) The article, which focused heavily on racist stereotypes in Geisel’s early work as a newspaper cartoonist and advertising artist, was widely distributed by Black Lives Matter Media.
On May 22 of the same year, Ishizuka presented a report titled “Rethinking Dr. Seuss for NEA’s Read Across America Day: Racism Within Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books & The Case for Centering Diverse Books” to the NEA’s Read Across America Advisory Committee. As the title suggests, Ishizuka argues that racism is present not only in Dr. Seuss’s cartoons but in his books, too. The now-“canceled” books, especially And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran a Zoo, figure prominently in this document. But Dr. Seuss’s most popular books are targeted too, notably the 1957 classic The Cat in the Hat — and the case against it has to be seen to be believed.
Relying largely on the then-upcoming book by Seuss scholar Philip Nel, Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, Ishizuka notes that the Cat was inspired in part by a real-life black woman — Annie Williams, an elevator operator in the Boston headquarters of Dr. Seuss publisher Houghton Mifflin — and argues that he also reflects the influence of “actual blackface performers and minstrelsy.” The first part is apparently true (according to Geisel himself); the second is an interesting but not entirely convincing hypothesis.
The Cat’s face, for example, is white. His attributes that Nel and Ishizuka trace to minstrelsy — dandyish top hat and bow tie, umbrella used as a cane — can also be commonly found in (non-blacked-up) white dancers such as Fred Astaire and James Cagney. Nel and Ishizuka see the cat’s tall hat with white and red stripes as similar to the polka-dotted top hats worn by blackface performers in Babes in Arms, the 1937 black-and-white musical. But why not the actual white-and-red striped top hat from Cagney’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), seen in color in the movie poster?
[…]
Ishizuka also toldSchool Library Journal that “black children may feel uncomfortable going to school on Read Across America Day”: “It’s very dehumanizing for black children to be expected to wear one of those hats.”
Shame no one told Michelle Obama she was presiding over a horrifically racist event at the White House just two years earlier.
Let’s not mince words: this is utterly deranged. It’s QAnon-level deranged, or Pizzagate-level deranged (butterflies in the decorations at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria were supposed to be hidden pedophile symbols, while references to “pizza” in the emails of Hillary Clinton advisor John Podesta were supposed to be code for child sex trafficking). It’s on the level of “Rock ’n’ roll records contain satanic messages if you play them backward,” or (to bring this back to kids’ fare) “The Teletubbies are gay propaganda,” as infamously claimed in the late Jerry Falwell’s National Liberty Journal in 1999.
Ishizuka’s critiques of Horton Hears a Who and The Sneetches, two books often taught as anti-racist classics, are only slightly less bizarre. Contradictions abound. Thus, Horton’s effort to protect the microscopic Whos sends the message that “people of color and/or oppressed groups need to be saved by white people” (Horton is, by the way, an elephant); but when the Whos finally have to save themselves by making enough noise to convince the world of their existence, that’s also bad, since it implies that “people of color need to prove their right to life and that their lives matter.” The Sneetches, a parable in which bird-like creatures with stars on their bellies bully and exclude their plain-bellied cousins until an entrepreneurial monkey causes chaos (and ultimately equality) with a device that can add or remove stars for a reasonable fee, is assailed because it “does not acknowledge … institutional or systemic racism” and “promotes the false narrative that colorblindness/‘not seeing race’ is the solution to racism.”
It’s not that people shouldn’t challenge our assumptions about cultural icons. That’s what the academy is supposed to be doing. But saying that even Dr. Seuss’ most innocent and even politically liberal works are racist should be the start of a conversation, not a means for shutting down debate altogether.
Of course, the Horton in the room is the fact that Dr. Seuss really did draw some horribly racist cartoons early in his career. I don’t mean that he stereotypical Chinese man in Mulberry Street, but truly awful stuff that might have been questionable when they were published. Young notes that a younger Philip Nel wrangled with that, and concluded that Geisel grew as a person and as an artist.
Twelve years later, Nel decided that Seuss was horribly racist even when he was arguing against racism:
A very different kind of anti-racist evolution is represented by Seuss scholar Philip Nel. In 2005, for the author’s centenary, Nel published a book called Dr. Seuss: American Icon, which honestly confronted its hero’s shortcomings — including his complicated history with regard to race — but also celebrated him as a voice for a better world. Fast-forward twelve years, and Nel is apologizing for having promoted the view of Dr. Seuss as “someone whose thinking on race evolved” and chiding Seuss for “misunderstanding how racism works.” For Nel in 2017, Seuss’s cartoon about “mental insecticide” for the “racial prejudice bug” is woefully inadequate, since “racism is not a bug. It’s a feature.” Nel now believes that all white people are “beneficiaries of white supremacy,” unaware of their “unearned privileges” and “complicity in oppression,” and that “Seuss exemplifies the sneaky resilience of racism,” ostensibly renouncing it while continuing to perpetuate it by reproducing racist visual tropes.
That’s the successor ideology in practice: you were racist when you were born and you will be racist when you die, you are only as good as your worst moments, you are absolutely not entitled to any forgiveness, and you have to “do better” though no one is entitled to tell how, and the rules are subject to change without warning. Where do I sign up to create this wonderful new world?
We should all approach our work with the enthusiasm Murray Walker brought to his job.
The voice of Formula One racing broadcasts on British (and Canadian) TV passed away this past weekend at age 97. There will never be another like him.