An Indictment of Democrat Failures During the Pandemic.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo panicked. He demanded that President Trump provide him with 30,000 respirators.

The question left hanging in the air was why didn’t New York State have an emergency pandemic stockpile of medical equipment?

Ask Governor Cuomo who, in 2015, rejected the need.

As for his ventilator demand, President Trump sent him 4,000. Cuomo demanded more, many more.

In the meantime, Cuomo kept Trump’s ventilators in a New Jersey warehouse in New Jersey saying he didn’t need them.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Cuomo said that President Trump doesn’t understand “how to run a government, how to plan an operation.”

Cuomo: “They sent 4,000 ventilators. I’m not using them today because I don’t need them today. I need to assemble them in a stockpile. “

March 27. Cuomo. “I follow the data.”

March 30. Cuomo. “The tsunami is coming!” If you haven’t done the work before the storm hits, it’s too late to do it once the storm hits. And the storm is coming. Stop the politics. Listen to the scientists and the pros and plan because otherwise … people will die who don’t need to die.”

A lot of panicky wordage and verbiage, but Trump delivered more than New York needed with far less words, and a lot more action.

March 17. Cuomo. “NY needs 110,000 hospital beds for corona patients. We only have 55,000.”  Trump sends him the army to convert the Javitz Center into coronavirus hospital. The President also converted the Comfort hospital ship to accommodate thousands of virus patients. Trump also provided six other new facilities providing 8,000 beds.

The Javitz Center and the Comfort were barely used. A clear case of Democrat panic and waste.

Despite the excess of hospital beds, Cuomo signed an order sending over 4,500 infected patients into unprotected nursing homes condemning over five thousand vulnerable elderlies to death. Cuomo defended his failed policy as being a “long term care” policy.

It was short term death for the senior inmates.

When rightly criticized, Cuomo first blamed the nursing homes. When asked whether he believes his policy requiring homes to admit infected patients contributed to the death toll, Cuomo said no.

“No, because you’d have to be saying the nursing homes were wrong in accepting COVID-positive patients,” he said. “That’s what you would have to be saying. Do you believe a nursing home operator would accept a patient who they knew they couldn’t care for? Why would a nursing home operator do that?”

Then he blamed the President. "Anyone who wants to ask 'why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes?' It’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance. So they should ask President Trump," he said. 

When asked by a reporter if family members can prosecute for the death of loved ones, Cuomo shamelessly said, “Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Nobody. Mother Nature? God? Where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus. That is the truth.”

The governor repeatedly emphasized that COVID-19 targets the elderly, and argued that vulnerable people would have died from the virus no matter what protocols were in place.

“You can have a situation where everyone did the right thing, and everyone tried their best, and people still die,” Cuomo said.

The Guardian, on May 26, revealed that Cuomo received a powerful healthcare industry $1 Million donation from GNYHA for his 2018 election campaign. This was conditional on indemnifying nursing home and hospital executives from lawsuits. Cuomo quietly introduced that legislation in April as part of his annual budget bill.

Now try suing nursing home executives for their criminally negligent behavior, New Yorkers. Good luck with that.

Sally Dreslin, the NY Health Executive Deputy Commissioner, and Howard Zucker, the NY Health Commissioner, who executed the plan to move infected people into vulnerable nursing homes, should be charged with criminal negligence. They are the ones who got Cuomo to sign off on the policy.

Dreslin was an alumni of Columbia who profiled her as a “Leading Light,” a “Change Agent for Nursing’s Future.”  Columbia was so proud of their graduates such as Dreslin that they wrote proudly if their alumni who “Excel at the Bedside and Far Beyond.”

In Dreslin’s case, far beyond the bedside for her patients was death imposed on them by her gruesomely wrong decision.

Columbia must be hanging its head in shame, but Cuomo’s 2018 election gift indemnifies Dreslin and Zucker from prosecution.

After covering his own backside, Cuomo followed up with a public announcement of a joint investigation into the state’s long-term care facility in conjunction with state attorney general Letitia James, promising fines of $10,000 per violation as well as the potential loss of licensure. How this links in with this indemnification commitment to GNYHA only time will tell.

Maybe Cuomo cannot be prosecuted for his wrong-headed policies, but he bears heavy responsibility for lacking common sense by being unaware of the danger of sending infected people into the facilities of the weak and elderly while practicing cynical protectionism.

Then we have PA Health Secretary, Rachel Levine, she of the manic-looking hair, who ordered Covid-19 patients into nursing homes to mingle with the weak and fragile elderly residents. 

With the temerity of knowing the inevitable consequences of her order, she moved her own mother out pretty sharpish in order to save her life. When questioned why she had rescued her from the inevitable jaws of death, she went on the defensive.

“My mother is 95 years old. She is very intelligent and more than competent to make her own decisions.”

In her arrogance, Levine refused to admit that she has left others to die due to her foolish and dangerous “health” policy.

Unlike her own mother, the other isolated old folk would just have to suck up and accept the consequences.

Unlike Levine, family members of the remaining elderly were not informed of the danger that had been injected into their parents and grandparents final resting place.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the face of regressive progressivism literally at the end of the day.

Such facilities accounted for more than two-thirds of all deaths statewide.

Levine had ordered infected people into care homes before she imposed virus testing. So much for the professionalism of the PA health expert, Rachel Levine, a decision approved by Governor Tom Wolf, which resulted in Pennsylvania’s nursing home death rate being 57.3% of the total in-state fatalities.

Why waste precious testing kits on the elderly? This seemed to be the calculating inhumanity of Democratic policy making. And they always preach from the disconnected heights of moral superiority?

Like PA Governor, Tom Wolf.

Wolf was criticized for enlarging his power base by creating costly bureaucratic jobs while ordering his peasants into harsh lockdown during his state’s virus crisis. This included the employed people and small business owners. It smacked of government overreach and a massive misuse of state funds.

By mid-May, a number of counties were defying Wolf’s stringent lockdown orders. Small business owners protested that they were facing bankruptcy and family financial ruin.   

This failed to move the Governor. In fact, he threatened them and called them names. He said he would penalize and cut off the water and electricity of any business that did not obey him.  Wolf called them cowards.

” They need to understand the consequences of their cowardly act.”

To Wolf, people who must work to work to feed their families are cowards. He also called them immoral.

In Pennsylvania, the Governor is a Wolf in progressive clothing.

Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, made herself very unpopular with a list of contradictory lockdown regulations. She allowed her citizenry to go out and buy liquor but not to buy paint. She allowed individuals to go kayaking on the state’s lakes but not go fishing. She had her state in tight lockdown until lifting long distance travel to second homes which allowed her husband to drive to their alternative residence in Antrim County to rake leaves and stay for a couple of nights.

That’s not all. Her husband, Marc Mallory, tried to get a small business to defy his wife’s lockdown orders when he asked North Shore Dock to ignore his wife’s lockdown order for them to release the family yacht onto the water in time for Memorial Day weekend. The Whitmer family intended to go sailing, something not permitted to others. During his efforts to persuade the company to do his bidding, he reminded them that he was the husband of the State Governor.

Company owner, Tad Dowker, reported the incident on Facebook. At first Whitmer denied it happened. But when confronted with the truth she pivoted to calling it a failed joke.

If there is a failed joke in this story it is the Governor Whitmer, another woman who thinks she is a candidate to be America’s next Vice President.

But there is worse. Whitmer signed a directive in mid-April that ordered that any nursing home with a population below 80% "must create a unit dedicated to the care of COVID-19-affected residents.”

By early May, the virus death toll was raging through Michigan nursing homes. As one lawmaker, a Democrat whose elderly mother was tested positive, said, her controversial decision was “the most stupid thing we could come up with.”

A State Oversight Committee member, Pete Lucido, said it was a “reckless disregard for human life.” He has called for an investigation.

According to some of the state’s health departments, the number of nursing home deaths came to 1,372, some 33% of Michigan’s fatalities, and numbers may be higher as the Whitmer Administration have not been fully transparent.

Democratic states seem to treat their elderly as third class citizens - after illegal immigrants and infected patients.  Is it down to mismanagement? Or do they consider them expendable, more of a cost burden on the state budget?

But the segment of the population suffering anxiety are not only the elderly. They are the age group up to 55. They are not anxious about dying. They are anxious about the chances of ever being able to live as they did before the lockdown.

Thousands, millions, do not see a way back to prosperity because Democrat governors and mayors stomped on their necks. The curve may have been flattened but the hopes and dreams of millions were sent into the abyss, maybe never to return.

Another hypocritical Democrat is Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker. Repeatedly, he demanded that his subjects stay in lockdown until he allows them out. With typical arrogance, Pritzker dodged an embarrassing question from a reporter who asked why, when everyone else in his state was stuck at home, his wife had jetted off to their $12 million equestrian estate in Florida.

Instead of apologizing to Illinoisans, his fired back, ““My official duties have nothing to do with my family. So, I’m just not going to answer that question. It’s inappropriate and I find it reprehensible, honestly that, that, uh that reporter wrote a story about it.”

A typical Democrat deflection, deflecting the guilt on to the reporter for asking the question rather than having the humility to admit his family’s wrong decision. So the guilt remains, and the good people of Illinois can decide on the efficacy of Pritzker come November.

In Virginia, Governor Ralph “Blackface” Northam, he of killing babies after birth notoriety, banned gatherings of more than ten people and forbade anyone in his state to go out without a mask. “Wearing a mask,” he said, “can literally save a person’s life.”

Clearly saving lives was not on Northam’s mind when he was photographed and filmed on a Virginia beach on Memorial weekend chatting with people, and not wearing a mask.

Hypocrite! But we knew that anyway, didn’t we?

It was the same with New York’s Mayor. De Blasio banned people walking in Central Park, except that he was publicly exposed by an irate citizen for doing precisely that with his wife and a couple of associates.

“Do as I say, not as I do,” has become a Democrat policy.

“This pandemic has just begun,” said California Governor, Gavin Newsom, almost enthusiastically in mid-May. His intention was clear. Keep them away from work.

New Mexico Governor, Michelle Lujan Griffin, enforced a lockdown on her public. This included closing all “non-essential” businesses. After lecturing New Mexicans to stay home, she allowed a non-essential shop to open briefly for the sole and exclusive service of having her browse covertly through their collection and have them deliver her purchase to her home.

Griffin is on the list of Biden candidates to be the next Vice President.

On a national level, American voters will not readily forgive the Democrats under Pelosi’s leadership for abandoning them when she refused to return the Democrats early to Congress to help forge an emergency budget for the hundreds of millions of Americans unable to earn a living.

Instead, they watched her gloat about her expensive and exclusive ice cream on a TV comedy show in her luxury California mansion.

The contrast could not be more striking.

In her selfish action she showed that her governance was not an essential service, and when she returned to the House it was to pass a bloated three trillion-dollar package that did absolutely nothing to help the unfortunate Americans in lockdown but had everything to do with blatantly advancing a Democrat political agenda.

And so it goes on and on and on.
Terrible cases of Democrat mismanagement in time of crisis. Minneapolis anyone? Minneapolis is not the prototype. Ferguson, Baltimore went before. Even Detroit and Chicago without the riots. All cities of utter Democrat social and economic failure now made worse due to their mishandling of the pandemic.

Despite all this failure, the Democrats really believe they can lead America.

Democrats have become a faith based political party. They believe the negative projections and models because it gives them hope to find their way back to power and domination over their people.

It allowed them to preach that America must remain in lock down for as long as possible, long enough to screw up the election process and twist it in their favor with mail-in ballots, the avoidance of mass rallies, and no televised head-to-head debates between Trump and Biden.  The Democrats pray that the ruin of the American economy would be Trump’s Via Dolorosa on his way to his crucifixion come November.

Covid was their epiphany after three desolate years of failure to remove the President. The virus fell like manna from heaven. The governors and the mayors supplicated themselves to the false gods of science and projections in order to guide their people toward the Promised Land of November. Their message is clear. No matter how many fall along the way, the Temple of Big Government will care for the survivors come Election Day.

God help us all!

Barry Shaw, Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.