Oh, the irony!
I'm not going to list the charges of sexual harassment and assault against Andrew Cuomo, mainly because they've grown exponentially in the past few days, and besides, you, as a follower of this blog, are smart enough to know all about them. But they're pretty serious, ranging from inappropriate touching to outright grabbing. Not by the you-know-what (while the pandemic has caused me to start dropping a whole arsenal of f-bombs, I'm not going to start using that word), but still an incredibly stupid thing to do. Cuomo has denied all of these allegations and thus insinuated that all of the women who are speaking up against him are liars, but, as with Bill Cosby, Cuomo has so many accusers that you have to figure that they can't all be lying.
Some folks have defended Cuomo's overdone glad-handling of women in his office as typical Italian-style physical expression, though his insistence that women in his employment doll themselves up for their jobs is only excused by the boss's Italian ethnicity if his name is Dolce or Gabbana and the employees walk up and down a runway wearing the boss's work. Cuomo has suggested that he's being accused of sexual harassment because he isn't part of the insider club in Albany, which would have much more resonance coming from a governorwho had not once been the New York State Attorney General, who had not been married to a Kennedy, and whose dad was not also governor of New York. Meanwhile, Cuomo's defenders have suggested that this scandal is a plot by Republicans to get Democrats to turn on the governor . . . and distract people from the serious issues of the day. You mean, like the issue of Cuomo undercounting COVID deaths in New York State nursing homes?
Many New York politicians are angrily demanding his resignation, but Cuomo remains self-righteously defiant and refuses to step down, insisting that he will be vindicated. Sounds like the words of a Republican President who served about fifty years ago. I've seen this before with other public figures - they deny the charges against them, they're convinced that they've done effective damage control, the press makes it clear that they have most certainly not done so, and then they start getting really ornery when they feel the heat and the pressure against them. And eventually, they fall . And when they land, they land hard. It happened to Richard Nixon. It happened to Gary Hart. And now it's happening to Andrew Cuomo. Stories of abuse and bullying in his office - more so toward women than men - and stories of similar behavior at home - Kerry Kennedy, his ex-wife, said she had to sleep in a locked bathroom near the end of her marriage to Cuomo - are already taking their toll. Cuomo's not the only political figure to go from being an icon to a joke, but this time it's a pretty bad joke that's no laughing matter.
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