Now that more has been revealed about issues with NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's management of the Cuomo crisis, a real opposition has been developing to his dominance in New York state politics.
Rather predictably, Cuomo is completely losing his sh%$ over this, and lashing out like a wounded animal.
Hizzoner has never been the most amiable of blokes, but he just threatened to "destroy" a state legislator over this:
For months, Assemblyman Ron Kim has been one of the few Democratic lawmakers willing to criticize Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for his handling of the state’s nursing homes during the pandemic, pressing for investigations into the matter.
So when a top aide to Mr. Cuomo recently admitted that his administration had withheld nursing home data from state lawmakers, Mr. Kim, whose Queens district was hit hard by the coronavirus, said it appeared the governor was “trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence.”
Hours after Mr. Kim made that comment to The New York Post last Thursday, he said he got an irate late-night call from the governor. Mr. Cuomo began with a question — “Are you an honorable man?” — and then proceeded to yell for 10 minutes, Mr. Kim recalled, threatening to publicly tarnish the assemblyman and urging him to issue a new statement clarifying his remarks.
Mr. Cuomo made good on his threat on Wednesday afternoon.
………
In lengthy remarks, Mr. Cuomo also accused the assemblyman of a “continuing racket” soliciting donations from nail salon owners, who were upset about a 2015 nail-salon reform law that he helped craft.
“I believe it was unethical if not illegal,” Mr. Cuomo said, suggesting that Mr. Kim was engaging in “pay to play.”
The scathing back-and-forth comes as the Cuomo administration continues to deal with the fallout from a series of revelations about its withholding the data, effectively covering up the full extent of how many nursing home residents died from the virus.
In the last month, the Cuomo administration has nearly doubled the official count of deaths of nursing home residents, from about 8,500 to more than 15,000 — in the face of a blistering report from the state attorney general, Letitia James, and a court order.
Mr. Cuomo has strongly denied any wrongdoing, despite a nearly six-month delay between the formal request from lawmakers in August and the release of the data in the wake of Ms. James’s report.
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The following day, after the Post story had published, Mr. Kim was home with his wife and about to bathe his children when he received the call from the governor.
Mr. Cuomo, he said, was furious with him about Mr. Kim’s comments to The Post, which quoted him as saying, among other things, that his takeaway from the call was that the Cuomo administration “had to first make sure that the state was protected against federal investigation.”
“He goes off about how I hadn’t seen his wrath and anger, that he would destroy me and he would go out tomorrow and start telling how bad of a person I am and I would be finished and how he had bit his tongue about me for months,” Mr. Kim said. “This was all yelling. It wasn’t a pleasant tone.”
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Cuomo officials maintained that the governor never said that he would “destroy” Mr. Kim, and characterized the conversation between the two men as “calm,” denying the governor yelled.
I believe Kim, not Cuomo, because Cuomo has cultivated a reputation for viciousness for decades, and I think that he is deathly afraid of what will happen to him when he is no longer feared.
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“The governor can personally attack me all he wants in an effort to distract us from his incompetent management,” Mr. Kim said in a statement. “But these facts are not going away because they are the facts and are unacceptable.”
Dave Sirota has a very good summary of how Cuomo screwed the pooch by prioritizing campaign donors over public health and then lied about it.
It has been made worse by his incompetent micro-management of the vaccine rollout, which has had doses thrown out rather than risk his draconian edicts.
The bottom line here is that Cuomo f%$#ed up, and his instinct on this matter, which is to try to bully his way out of this, does not appear to be working.
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