What’s with Andrew Cuomo? Everyone wants to know. Obviously, some mistakes have been made. We were living in the midst of a pandemic when New Yorkers and other Americans were dying at an alarming rate. There were people who were sent to nursing homes from hospitals who died.
All Cuomo had to do was to tell the truth. Very few of us would have held it against him. But Andrew is a bit of a control freak and doesn’t want to be wrong. I get that, but he has to know that is who he is. He’s in a terrible spot, surrounded by envious, angry politicians and by some desperate, reader-hungry newspapers who will not forgive him for past mistreatments. When you are in the soup, it is very important to have friends who will stick with you. I ain’t seeing them.
When he was attorney general (almost governor), he went after Eliot Spitzer with all that he had. Spitzer has to be chuckling now. Some newspapers are calling for his resignation but it is unlikely the guy will quit. It is not in his character. He wants to run for a fourth term. Possibly, that can be ascribed to competition with his father. He wants that fourth term! So far, some papers have found people to critique his aggressive approach to the opposite sex. My bet is that there will be others.
I am getting a ton of mail about Cuomo. Most of the mail is quite positive — people like and admire Cuomo and want to know what will happen. Much of that mail is from women. The very few pieces of negative mail I get are more about me being too nice to the guy. The truth is that we are not friends. He doesn’t speak to me on the air as he used to.
In fact, for the first eight years he was governor he wouldn’t speak to me. I was extremely critical about him during these first years in office. At one point, when he came out with an aggressive gun control program, I wrote an “atta-boy” column. That was the only time he personally called me up and said, “I heard you wrote a good column about me. Why’d you do that?” I told him, “I did it to confuse you, governor.”
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Since everyone is checking in on the British royal family, I thought I would have a go at it, too. First comes the question of who gives a damn? Actually, I do. I love the pomp and circumstance of the royals and so do many other people around the world. It’s the British equivalent of Disneyland. The fact is, no matter who or where you are, we are all in the same boat. There are facets of their lives that we see every day in our own: who we marry, who in the family checks in with unwelcome remarks. Hey, if Meghan Markle acknowledges she was contemplating suicide, that puts her in a situation known to a lot people.
Prince Harry has now become the American branch of royalty. He is handsome, well spoken, seemingly very nice, and he may well object to the rules of primogeniture. I mean, by an accident of birth, his brother gets it all and he gets shoved to the end of the line. Look, I am a twin. If this was a matter of being king or not, I would get the prize because I was born five minutes earlier than my brother, who could be both brighter and more successful in life than I am.
There are those who think that royalty is a bad idea. I am not one of them. These people are rich, all right, but think of all those millionaires and billionaires who get their money from someone else who made it.
