Tough contest, but Mayor Putz, Bill de Blasio, is more popular in New York these days than the Granny Killer, Gov. Cuomo.
“People would tend to like a bungling idiot more than a homicidal maniac” is how “Bernie and Sid” put it yesterday on their top-rated WABC radio show.
And that was in the morning, before former Cuomo adviser Lindsey Boylan dropped a bucket on her ex-boss, alleging he “sexually harassed me for years,” to the point that she felt nauseous coming to work and finally had to quit.
“Andrew Cuomo abused his power as governor to sexually harass me, just as he had done with so many other women,” she wrote in an essay on Medium.
She recalled in excruciating detail how Cuomo forcibly kissed her on the mouth, touched her “lower back, arms and legs,” once suggested they play strip poker, stalked her at a party and had staffers tell the 36-year-old married mother that he had a “crush on her.”
When she confided in her family, her mother diagnosed the 63-year-old governor as a “sexist pig” and warned Lindsey to stay away from him.
Already under fire over the nursing-home scandal, Cuomo can add “sexual predator” to the long list of allegations that has both Democrats and Republicans demanding that he resign or be impeached.
Boy, the worm has turned on the “Luv Guv,” and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
The outrage is that his bullying, catastrophic ineptitude has been obvious to his Democratic colleagues from the start.
As city Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said Wednesday at an anti-Cuomo rally, everyone knew what the governor was.
“This is who he has always been long before the pandemic . . . It is finally exposing who we knew this governor was all along, from pay-to-play with real estate to pay-to-play with nursing-home owners, to ducking accountability, to passing blame to everyone but himself, to bullying tactics.”
State Assemblyman Ron Kim said Cuomo threatened to “destroy” him unless he issued a statement to cover up for Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa after she admitted Cuomo had “withheld lifesaving nursing-home data” from lawmakers for fear it would be used against him.
“Everyone in New York politics knows he has been abusive for a long time,” Kim told Bloomberg TV last week, “to his staff, elected officials, even journalists.”
So why did they cover Cuomo him for so long?
Because he was the designated foil for Donald Trump.
Women swooned over his macho-man daily briefings last spring where he oozed fake empathy and shared spaghetti-sauce recipes, while secretly signing a death warrant for at least 10,000 seniors.
Nancy Pelosi confessed she was a “big fan.” Ex-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley tweeted how much she looked forward to his daily “therapy session.”
Joe Biden hailed him as the “gold standard” in leadership.
Cuomo even won an Emmy for his televised briefings, for God’s sake.
But the truth was, that for a third-term governor, he was woefully unprepared for the pandemic. He downplayed the virus, bickered with de Blasio and dithered on locking down New York until March 22, a week after overruling de Blasio’s request, by which time cases already were doubling every three or four days.
He refused to close down the subways when City Council members begged him in April, even though it was a major COVID spreader.
When Trump sent the USNS Comfort hospital ship and deployed the Army Corps of Engineers to construct eight field hospitals in New York, Cuomo left them empty and instead issued his deadly memo forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients.
As New Yorkers were dropping like flies, he wrote a book promoting himself.
He scared Democratic voters off “Trump’s vaccine” and now is puzzled that minority communities are reluctant to get shots.
Instead of prioritizing the elderly, he inserted woke metrics into the vaccine rollout and threatened vaccinators with fines if they didn’t stick to his rules, with the result that precious doses where thrown in the trash.
On top of it all, he was a chump. He paid $12 million to a Chinese sex-toy store named “Please Me,” reportedly to buy 1,000 ventilators, and now taxpayers have to pay millions more in legal fees to sue the company.
Cuomo’s hysterical, muddled response to the pandemic delivered us the second highest COVID death rate in the country.
But the big news through it all was whether or not the bulge under his too-tight polo shirt was a nipple ring.
The media adulation wasn’t just because he had a sycophantic brother over at CNN. It was because his briefings were a tool for belittling Trump and blaming him for every COVID death. Democrats would have worshipped at the feet of Caligula if the governor made Trump look bad.
At least Cuomo’s downfall goes to show that bullies don’t prosper if their victims fight back.
It just takes just one person of courage for the floodgates to open, because bullies never have one victim. They abuse everyone around them to overcome their feelings of inadequacy.
In Cuomo’s case, it was Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean who led the charge after two in-laws died in nursing homes.
It’s been stormy weather for him ever since.
Drama queen Markle
There’s only one word for the way Meghan Markle is treating her grandmother-in-law, the Queen: despicable.
There’s no mistaking her deliberate malice any more.
How else to explain that she announced her tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey at the precise time the Queen’s 99-year-old husband, Prince Philip, is in the hospital and ill enough that his son Prince Charles left after a visit with what looked very like tears glistening in his eyes?.
To make matters worse, the Oprah interview is to air March 7, the same day of the Queen’s annual address to the Commonwealth.
I single out Meghan because it’s obvious who wears the pants. Hapless Prince Harry doesn’t hate his family. He just doesn’t want to antagonize his pushy princess.
The pair have been cashing in on his royal pedigree ever since she engineered their “Megxit” for from the royal family, so it was inevitable that the Queen would put an end to their official royal “life of service.”.
But Meghan had to have the last word: “We can all live a life of service. Service is universal,” she sneered last week. As if getting rich babbling politically correct nonsense is a service to anyone but yourself.
Meghan has been cruel enough with her own father, so we shouldn’t be surprised that she would be awful to her in-laws, but the disrespect shown to the 94-year-old monarch will be the last straw for the British public.