FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – Eleven years ago an enraged upstate New York businessman, Carl Paladino, stunned the New York State political establishment in a precursor to the Trump Revolution when he rode an insurgent candidacy to win the Republican nomination for Governor of New York State.
With a “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” slogan, Paladino hammered incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as those he perceived as corrupt within his own party. This populist uprising briefly showed, in several polls, that the straight-talking businessman from Buffalo was actually in a competitive position in the race for Governor against Cuomo.
Paladino’s campaign collapsed when The New York Times sat on evidence that Andrew Cuomo was a sexual abuser and failed to pursue why records of 911 calls to the Cuomo home for “domestic abuse” had disappeared.
When Paladino claimed at an Association For a Better New York breakfast that Andrew Cuomo was a shameless womanizer and that New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was a “crook” who belonged in jail, as well as insisting that New York State Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was also corrupt and should be prosecuted, the vengeance with which the New York State establishment media excoriated Paladino for charges they claimed were “baseless” was both swift and effective in collapsing the viability of Paladino’s candidacy.
On August 3rd, 2021, a Special Investigation Report by the New York Attorney General proved that, if anything, Paladino understated his claims regarding Governor Andrew Cuomo. Former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was convicted of corruption charges twice in July of 2020. Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was sentenced to just over four years when convicted on corruption charges in 2018. In other words, Carl Paladino has been vindicated.
What is it about New York Democrats? Andrew Cuomo is the second Democrat Governor of New York to resign in a sex scandal. His predecessor Eliot Spitzer was renounced for wearing groovy black knee socks while cavorting with prostitutes. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was forced to resign when several women came forward with claims of violent sexual abuse. In each of these cases, the foibles of these statewide elected officials were well-known among the elite political class. It is only because of a deeply conflicted New York press corp that their abuses and the resulting public outrage regarding their conduct would only be revealed and reach critical mass when their victims made their complaints public and provided documentation.
The same New York media outlets that are triumphant in Andrew Cuomo’s resignation are the very outlets that worked so hard to protect Cuomo from the hard-charging Paladino. New York Times reporter Danny Hakim effectively covered up multiple serious allegations of corruption and misconduct by Cuomo, who was famous for calling reporters late at night and badgering them about upcoming stories and essentially demanding the adoption of his narrative of events.
In the end, Cuomo was brought down not by conservatives or Republicans but by the progressive left of his own party. New York progressives recognize that Andrew Cuomo is a man devoid of any political principle other than the accumulation and use of power. They are well aware that the son of Governor Mario Cuomo was a latecomer to abortion-on-demand, same-sex marriage, and the legalization of cannabis.
Democrats within his own party were privately outraged when Cuomo openly thwarted their efforts to win a majority in the State Senate preferring to deal with a coalition of Republicans and renegade Democrats. But Cuomo’s power was absolute and few dared cross him, as his retribution was known to be both swift and brutal.
Constantly pulled leftward by New York State’s Working Families Party, Cuomo won a surprisingly narrow victory in the Democrat Primary against unknown and under-funded WFP candidate Zephyr Teachout. Cuomo’s aggressive bullying style and his effective use of State power kept his enemies at bay. Only months ago national democrats were openly regretting that Joe Biden, rather than Andrew Cuomo, was not their candidate.
The truth of Andrew Cuomo’s resignation is that nothing changes. New York will continue to be run in the same, disastrous, mafia-style government, and the Democrat has protected itself from political fallout of Cuomo’s real crime of deliberately infecting tens of thousands of New York seniors with Covid-19. His Lieutenant Governor, Kathy Hochul, will take over. As the classic, The Who song goes, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
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