I realized after writing a column last week about how terrible Andrew Cuomo has been at his job, that I had missed one of his lowlights. I already knew that he didn’t start sanitizing NYC subway trains until early May, but I didn’t realize that he hadn’t reversed his earlier order that nursing homes must take in elderly patients with the virus (“I wonder how that turned out?” you are not asking yourselves, because even Dunce Cap Ocasio-Cortez could figure that one out) until almost Mother’s Day!
The Cuomos remind me of a very old joke, which I will tweak to fit the situation now:
Chris Cuomo dies. It’s not important how. (Though the smart money is on either “he wandered into traffic” or “he drank aquarium cleaner.”) The day before his funeral a new priest arrives at his parish, and so has to give his eulogy.
During the service, the priest says, “As most of you know, since I just got here yesterday, I didn’t know the deceased personally. In cases like these, I like to ask those who knew him best if they would like to share some of the positive things about him, and what he meant to them.”
Silence. The priest starts to get a little nervous. “I know that many of you may be shy about public speaking. But please, tell us your thoughts: what did you like most about Chris Cuomo?”
More silence. Nobody can meet the priest’s eyes. They’re all looking at their shoes, and fidgeting uncomfortably.
The priest is starting to sweat now: this is a terrible start for him in his new parish. “Ladies and gentlemen, please. I know that you all knew the departed well. Someone, anyone… tell me the nicest thing about Chris Cuomo.”
After a few more mortifying moments of silence, one miserable guy in the back row gets jabbed in the ribs by a family member, and he reluctantly stands up. The priest feels a wave of relief, and gestures for the man to speak.
He clears his throat, then quickly says, “His brother was worse,” and sits down.
That’s the best thing I can say about Chris Cuomo. He may be a phony, fake-quarantining, partisan hack with the intellect of a petrified block of wood.
But his brother is worse.
Speaking of worse, I have a riddle for you: How do you take a press conference during which a dishonest reporter asked a disingenuous pseudo-question, and then played the race card when Trump pushed back, and make that situation worse?
Answer: get Brian Stelter involved.
You probably already know what I’m referring to. On May 11th, Trump was being all Trumpy, and touting the fact that the US has rapidly ramped up our virus testing. I’m not sure why he would do such a thing… unless it was because the MSM has just spent the last two months shrieking about how the US is not doing enough testing.
“Why are we doing less testing than South Korea or Italy?” they mope. Fauci interrupts to say, “Actually, in real numbers we are doing more testing than—”
“But we’re a big country,” interrupts another fatuous J-school grad, “what about per capita?”
Dr. Scarf starts to say, “Per capita too, we’re doing more testing than any of our European counterpart—”
“What about Wakanda, and Brigadoon, and Xanadu and the Emerald City,” shout a chorus of doofi with press credentials, “and other made-up places that we know would be handling this pandemic much better, if they weren’t as fictional as Corn Pop and Liz Warren’s proud Commanche ancestors?” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
So, yeah. Trump was pointing out that we’re doing a hell of a lot of virus testing.
Enter Asian reporter and leftist spinmeister (but I repeat myself) Weijia Jiang (BA in Grievance Studies from Noam Chomsky University, with a double major in Passive Aggressive non-question questioning). When Trump called on her, she said, “”Why is this a global competition to you if every day Americans are still losing their lives?” This is obviously not a legit question; it’s a slimy shot at Trump, insinuating that he’s been treating this virus as a game, and that he’s to blame for Americans dying from the WuFlu.
By the way, how do you know that our efforts are stacking up pretty well in comparison to those of other nations? Because if some of the left’s beloved s-hole countries (and the “s” doesn’t stand for “socialist.”) (Though, wait a minute – yes it does. Also, for a synonym for “socialist.”) were doing better, Jiang would be sneering, “How come we’re losing the global competition to Venezuela and Cuba?”
Anyway, Trump counter-punched on the insulting implication that the virus is his fault – which he’s only had to deal with about 10,000 times since the bat-savoring Communist slave masters in Beijing loosed this pandemic on the world – by telling her to “ask China.”
Jiang shot back, “Sir, why are you saying that to me specifically? That I should ask China?” To his credit, Trump didn’t say the obvious: I’m saying that to you specifically, because you are the specific idiot who just implied that the virus is my fault. Have you noticed that I never say, “Thanks for that question, random hateful reporter. I’d like to address my answer to the secret service guy over there, or maybe to the guy selling hotdogs at the cart across the street?”
Ugh. Just when you thought this tired race-baiting BS had become as offensive as it could possibly be, into the fray wades the hack who looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb: Brian Stelter. And surprise, surprise – he detects racism, as he makes clear in this comment, which I wish I were making up, “It is racist to look at an Asian-American White House correspondent and say, ‘Ask China.’ This isn’t happening in a vacuum. This is part of a pattern of behavior from the president that goes back many years.”
Read that again, and wonder at the awesome thick-headedness of CNN’s Thumble-stiltskin. In the first sentence, he says that it is racist to tell Jiang to, “Ask China,” the idea being that he only said that because she’s Asian. In the very next sentence – that’s not a figure of speech: I mean the very. next. sentence. — he says that “this is part of a pattern … that goes back many years.”
Brian Stelter, you ignorant slut! If you argue in one sentence that it’s uniquely racist for Trump to blame China to a Chinese-American reporter, you cannot argue (in the NEXT SENTENCE!) that he does this all the time, to many reporters, very few of whom are Asian.
It’s hard to comprehend the depth of the MSM talking heads’ delusions. Anybody who has watched Trump for 5 minutes know that he’s a wild counter-puncher. Anyone who attacks him – no matter their race, gender, nationality or phylum — is going to get strafed with insults right back. Hell, he claimed that Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK, and he insulted Jeb Bush’s energy level and Marco Rubio’s manhood! And those guys are in his own party!
Trump doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and Americans know that. But he doesn’t trade insults with Asian fools, or white fools, or black fools, or Hispanic fools because they’re Asian, white, black, or Hispanic. It’s because he thinks they’re fools.
And he’s not usually wrong about that.
Finally, as I’ve been heartened by watching the citizens of red and blue states alike starting to resist and protest the heavy-handed bullying of their (mostly leftist) mayors and governors, I’ve come up with an idea that I wish somebody in the GOP national leadership would propose: every politician should agree to forego their salary for the duration of this crisis.
The average net worth of congressmen and senators is into the millions, and I’m sure that the same goes for most governors and big city mayors. Because that’s true, and because they and their staffs aren’t missing any paychecks, they are out of touch with the real pain that this is causing the tens of millions of Americans who have lost jobs, and the more than 100 million who have lost income and savings, on top of the losses to their 401ks and other retirement savings, if they have any.
For them, this lockdown is like water torture, an infliction of pain as every day passes with no work or business. That wears on a person’s mind and emotions in a way that nobody who has millions in the bank and a steady paycheck can viscerally understand. My wife and I have both continued to get paid, so I know that even though we feel for our fellow citizens in an intellectual and empathetic way, we have not been directly suffering as they have.
And if that’s true for us, it’s true 1000 times over for the pampered, entitled narcissists who are enforcing this lockdown on us. Add to that the palpable political gains for national leftists – an ever-more dependent populace, a commensurate increase in their own political power, and the prospect of damaging Trump’s chances at re-election – and you can understand why leftist governors like Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker and Andrew Cuomo and leftist house leaders like Captain Pencil Neck and the Botox Kid are doing their best to extend the lock down until after November, if possible.
If our GOP leaders were smart and principled – I know, I said “if” – they’d bring up a bill immediately to suspend their own salaries, retroactive to April 1st. Doing so would show us that we all really are in this together, and that Bill Clinton’s infamous come-on line – “I feel your pain” (not to mention your buttocks) – might finally be true.
And call me cynical, but if they did that, I think they’d be ending the lockdown by about Wednesday afternoon.
Because if there is one thing upon which nearly all Americans agree, it is that at the very top of any reasonable list of non-essential jobs would have to be “politician.”
Avenatti/Thumbkin Stelter 2020!
Martin Simpson 
Great column….I tried to share to FB but there isn’t that capacity to do so. I went through all of CO’s postings for May 17 and 18 and could not find it. I suspect that your columns don’t always get shared but this is a great one.
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