As all the world now knows, last Wednesday, a former aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo named Lindsey Boylan publicly accused her former boss of sexually harassing her in 2018.
Before the day was through, the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN had all run stories on Ms. Boylan’s salacious accusations, making it major national news.
Before three more days had passed, the New York Times managed to conduct “a series of interviews” with a second former aide for a story reporting that, last spring, she too had been subjected to unwanted sexual advances from Cuomo.
Of course, there’s nothing quite so pleasurable as watching an enemy get a taste of his own medicine. So — given how the Democrats have been using unfounded accusations of sexual impropriety to destroy conservatives going back at least as far as their despicable attempt to stop Clarence Thomas from taking a seat on the Supreme Court — predictably, the conservative media gleefully piled on.
But maybe we should have paused and asked ourselves some simple questions before reacting.
Maybe we were just taking the bait.
Why, after all, would a committed Democratic Party activist suddenly decide to go public with these charges against one of the most prominent politicians in her own party almost three years after the fact?
And, why would the mainstream media — whose job it is to see that major stories that might actually harm the Democrats never see the light of day (think Hunter Biden’s laptop) — decide to propel these accusations into major news?
Though the irresistible pleasure of shouting “Tu quoque!” seems to have obscured this fact for a lot of people, the accusations against Cuomo barely rise past the level of boorish behavior.
Perhaps we ought to forbid sexual relations between bosses and their employees but the fact of the matter is that we don’t. And, given that even a woman who finds herself deeply attracted to some man is still overwhelmingly likely to expect him to make the first move, until the day men develop an infallible sense for when advances are and aren’t welcome, episodes like Cuomo’s accusers describe are going to occur.
Cuomo has already given the standard “If I offended anyone I’m sorry” spiel. And it’s not at all clear that these sexual harassment charges the media is so intent on playing up are going to damage him all that much at the end of the day.
As the vastly more serious misdeeds of Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton clearly show, the Democrats don’t really give a damn about protecting women and only pretend to do so when there’s something to be gained.
Moreover, even if the mainstream media’s strange and inexplicable desire to hype these accusations does end Cuomo’s career in politics — as pleasurable as the idea may be for conservatives to contemplate — what’s the actual payoff?
His career was already finished because of another vastly more serious scandal that, coincidentally, is being buried by the media’s relentless focus on these salacious but ultimately trivial charges suddenly being levied by a couple of Democrat operatives — in the first instance, almost three years after the fact.
And this other far more egregious scandal has the potential to blow up and encompass many more major party players and maybe even lead to criminal charges.
I’m speaking, of course, about Cuomo’s March 25 order barring New York nursing homes from turning away patients diagnosed with COVID-19.
As any fool could have predicted, packing patients diagnosed with a respiratory virus into nursing homes locked down by Cuomo’s other orders so that the already frail and elderly long-term residents were forced to continually breathe in recirculated air now rife with infectious pathogens was bound to sow catastrophe.
New York ranks second in reported COVID-19 fatalities whether by absolute numbers or relative to population. And a huge reason for the state’s extraordinarily high tally is the enormous number of nursing home deaths it suffered.
Cuomo worked overtime covering up any role his March 25 order may have had in causing them. But the idiotic decision to publish a book about what a great job he’d done battling COVID-19 together with his cross-country victory-tour promoting it was beginning to make it tough for the mainstream media to keep ignoring how ill-conceived his mandate was and the massacre that followed.
Lindsey Boylan sudden decision to air three-year-old accusations of boorish behavior that in no way broke any laws, however, took the pressure off by giving them another more or less toothless scandal to relentlessly hype in its stead.
Boylan also helped drown out the much more serious scandal by getting the conservative media that actually had been covering it to shift their focus to her more sensational and much simpler to write about and explain story.
Google has a feature that lets you compare how often users have searched for different phrases. And, as you can see below, the accusations of unwanted sexual advances raised by Democrat Party operatives and trumpeted by their media allies managed to swamp the much more serious story of how Cuomo may be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of elderly New Yorkers.
Sheer coincidence, I suppose.
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) March 1, 2021
Moreover, as I noted in Saturday‘s column:
- It turns out that three other Democrat governors whose states also experienced an extraordinarily high number of reported COVID-19 nursing-home fatalities also issued the exact same orders as Cuomo—Tom Wolf (PA), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), and Phil Murphy (NJ).
- The orders forcing nursing homes to accept patients diagnosed with COVID-19 issued by the quartet may wind up being responsible for an enormous proportion of the total number of reported U.S. deaths.
- Because of the way COVID-19 diagnoses have been incentivized by the government, those orders wound up raking in a fortune for nursing homes.
- Cuomo also signed a law passed by New York state’s Democrat-controlled legislature giving nursing homes immunity against civil liability from COVID-19 related lawsuits.
As I also reported on Saturday, it just so happens that a powerful New York nursing-home lobbying outfit made enormous and unprecedented donations to both Cuomo’s campaign and the state Democratic Party in 2018.
It would have been tough for the media to keep ignoring Cuomo’s burgeoning nursing home scandal had Lindsey Boylan not given them those salacious but ultimately trivial three-year-old accusations of unwanted sexual advances to start hyping instead.
Likewise, if Charlotte Bennett and her “series of interviews” with the New York Times hadn’t come along a few days later to keep the story alive.
And the nursing home scandal which, coincidentally, they so effectively buried didn’t merely have the potential to lead to criminal charges. It was also likely to engulf at least three other major league Democrat politicians and expose just how much of the US official COVID-19 death tally was due to conduct on their part that may have been criminally negligent or worse.
The fortune Cuomo’s orders dumped into nursing-home coffers and the unprecedented campaign contributions they’d previously made was also bound to start getting some attention if some more sexy but ultimately much less serious allegations hadn’t emerged to take center stage.
Seems to me like maybe we’re being played.
