Cuomo’s government probably could not get away with the fingernails of Attorney General Letitia James – even the crazy politics of New York have limits – but he no doubt wants to try. The governor is a terrible vengeful man.
Political big shot or anonymous government’s toil, it does not matter – cross Cuomo, or stand in his way, and aim for heavy weather.
On Thursday, James tore apart the crust of a grieving Cuomo administration and exposed the hard lethal toll that the coronavirus claimed in New York’s nursing homes last year with hard data. She thereby thwarted the governor’s efforts to disguise an astonishing example of maladministration.
History has shown that Cuomo could even cope with this betrayal – or try a vein.
And except for the substantial merits of James’ report, it’s a betrayal. The AG would still be the public advocate in New York if Cuomo’s definitive aid in the 2018 election had not been lifted to her current seat.
So, how sharper than a snake tooth to have an ungrateful child, and all that jazz?
After James was installed, it was just as small and biased as her patron, and polished her progressive creditworthiness by fighting former President Donald Trump incessantly, suing the National Rifle Association, and so on.
It is therefore with some irony, but no surprise, that her damning nursing home report follows in form and function the devastating attack that then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo brought against the then government. Eliot Spitzer in 2007. It would have taken a scandal for hired women to evict Spitzer from office, but his slide began with Cuomo’s malicious notice.
Spitzer, a former attorney general who himself was no stranger to retaliation, immediately went to war with the state Senate when he became governor – improperly, if not illegally. aircraft.
Or so Cuomo charged in a 53-page report – a bolt-of-the-blue investigation that stabbed an unsuspecting Spitzer politically.
Something like what Tish James did to her patron on Thursday. She, of course, paid attention to the larger landscape during her rise from New York City City Council to New York City Attorney General.
Spitzer’s real sin, of course, was to hold an office that Cuomo rightly considered his own. Whether James has similar ambitions remains to be seen, but who does not say? And can the governor not complain if that is the case – to be a fair play? (Or maybe the monster that kills Dr. Frankenstein?)
Revenge, of course, is another matter. No small thing is too small to escape Cuomo’s knowledge.
Just last month, there was Lindsey Boylan, a former government official who accused the governor of sexual harassment and soon after discovered that her government personnel file had been “acquired” by the Associated Press.
If we are not to avoid the merits of Boylan’s charges – she prefers her as president of the Manhattan borough – news organizations should not obtain such records. They let it be delivered.
Boylan’s experience is similar to that of Mike Fayette, a former civil engineer who was forced out of his government job in 2012 because he spoke to a small newspaper in the Adirondack area without permission. The state director of operations, Howard Glaser, actually went to read over the radio from Fayette’s personnel file!
Again, big or small – no one is outside Cuomo’s gimlet look.
Veral Bill de Blasio.
Bitter rivalries between mayors and mayors are traditional – Nelson Rockefeller against John Lindsay was epic – but the torment Cuomo visited on the Blasio borders on the pathological. Make it sadistic.
Where enough, the bumpy, foolish and monumentally lazy mayor brought much Cuomo hellish fire upon himself; nevertheless, start on Day 1, when the mayor says ‘on’, bark the governor ‘off!’
Since the pandemic, when de Blasio said ‘open’, Cuomo said ‘closed’, and vice versa. New York’s scandalously chaotic deployment of the coronavirus vaccine is a product of this childish bickering, but there is hardly a single aspect of the city – state relationship – housing, education, mass transit, etc. – that has not suffered as well. not.
It’s hard to imagine James trying to deny Cuomo a fourth term next year or, more rightly, waiting to avoid retaliation for Thursday’s report. She knows the record as well as anyone.
But regardless of her plans, she handed the governor only a complete ration of his own politics and good for her. If anyone would ever get it, it’s Andrew Cuomo.
Twitter: @ rlmac2