Mario Cuomo has announced his resignation. I want to be happy about this. Not so much because I care about who holds the executive position in New York, but rather because it is the overthrow of an attempt to make him a hero, perhaps even to usher him into the presidency.
A year and half ago Mario Cuomo was holding daily press briefings in opposition to the president’s briefings, and the portion of the press which opposed Donald Trump was on a king making mission. They were portraying him as the hero America needed, and subtly suggesting how much better he would be in the white house than its then occupant. He was handsome, he was morally upright, he was a policy making genius. Or so we were told.
Even when evidence began to pile up that Cuomo’s policies had caused the needless deaths of thousands of senior citizens, he simply shifted the blame to federal and of course to the scapegoat in chief. The media attempting to crown him accepted it as fact, without bothering to check evidence, Donald Trump was somehow responsible for those lives.
The whole narrative allowed them to continue down the path of teaching the public that anything associated with Donald Trump was bad, evil, racist, fascist. And a pleasant corollary to that narrative was that Mario Cuomo was a golden boy, who by all rights should be a national hero. Pour accolades on him, whether it makes sense or not.
Then accusations started about how he had interacted with women throughout his career. These were easily dismissed, at first. But without any way of blaming the behavior of the governor on the president, their tower of blocks began to wobble. Eventually his own state government kicked down the ill-fated pedestal, by investigating and finding he had done some horrible things.
Part of me wants to be happy about this, not because Mario Cuomo was dethroned, but because the media which was building him up was thwarted. But I can’t manage a lot of happiness over this detail because it is so incomplete. We are going through a period of history where detail after detail which the media claimed as false or racist, because of their association with Trump, are being determined correct. The virus really did come from China. It really has been man-made. It really did leak from the lab in Wuhan. If these revelations are victories, they are incomplete victories. They are meaningless, as they are. The media was allowed to shape reality with their distortion. Now even if they admit they were mistaken, that admission is incomplete unless they also confess they were using this misinformation in attempts to shape an election, redirect national polity and to change the political landscape. When there is no consequence for this manipulation of the public, it’s impossible to be all that happy with the little victories where truth is finally
Charles W. Short 