Tipsheet

It Remains Hilarious How the Liberal Media Reacts to Sexual Misconduct Allegations When Democrats Are Targeted

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  March 05, 2021 5:05 PM

The real scandal is that he was responsible for increasing the butcher’s bill from COVID by forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients. The New York attorney general’s office noted the nursing home order might have spread the disease. It certainly increased the deaths. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office has been accused of undercounting the true death toll by 50 percent. New York is once again engulfed by scandal and corruption, but there are also the sexual harassment and misconduct allegations that have hit this office as well. Three women allege impropriety at the hands of Gov. Cuomo—literally. In the Me Too era, ‘Believe all Women’ is the war cry and Cuomo has to go, right? That was certainly the standard set forth during the nasty Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. If you’re a conservative and you’re accused of sexual misconduct—you’re guilty. No need to verify anything, which was at the heart of the Kavanaugh fight. NOTHING was corroborated during this circus. The main accuser Christine Blasey Ford had more holes in her story than a piece of Swiss cheese, and the ones after that were even shoddier. The accusation that exposed this character assassination attempt was Julie Swetnick’s laughably unbelievable story that Kavanaugh was part of a gang-rape ring in high school. In the end, these accusations were all grounded in the Left’s opposition to Kavanaugh whilst protecting the right to abortion. Ford’s lawyer said the quiet part out loud months after this fight. 

So, with Cuomo, it’s very interesting to see that the Left is starting to value due process in all its biased glory. It’s truly amazing how Slate magazine, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal publication, handles sexual misconduct allegations when Democrats are targeted:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo stands accused by three different women of sexual harassment. And yet, oddly enough, he is still serving as governor. And that, friends, maybe a good thing.

In Monday’s New York Times, Michelle Goldberg suggests that the failure of high-profile Democrats to demand Cuomo’s resignation in the face of credible (and contemporaneously reported) claims about inappropriate comments, texts, and behavior suggests a diminution in the power of #MeToo. As she argues, not incorrectly, “if this scandal had broken a few years ago, high-profile Democrats would have felt no choice but to call for Cuomo’s resignation.” Goldberg also surmises that part of this failure stems from a public pivot away from gender to race concerns, and a lingering regret on the part of Democrats about ejecting Al Franken from the Senate.

Goldberg’s points are all true enough. But what if the lesson here is not that #MeToo has somehow failed, or lost steam, but rather that the #MeToo movement—which rightly encouraged people to speak out about abuse, prompting plenty of reckonings and buckets of important journalism—was never sufficient to do all the work of remedying sexual predation? As I have tried to argue throughout the #MeToo era, journalism when it is not followed up by fact-finding and due process was never going to be the answer to the power and information imbalances that lead to sexual harassment and abuse in Hollywood, in government, and in the judiciary. Perhaps Democrats who demanded that Al Franken depart the Senate before any formal investigatory process was undertaken haven’t so much soured on the possibility of bringing sexual predators to justice as they have come to realize that insisting on resignations before there has been an investigation is not a good strategy.

[…]

I am a journalist myself, and I am wholly in favor of a sober and serious probe into Cuomo’s alleged conduct. It’s not a terrible thing to allow an independent investigator to gather all the facts and arrive at a formal conclusion before calling for his immediate ouster. To allow a formal fact-finding process to play out is neither a disparagement of his accusers—whose accounts should be taken absolutely seriously—nor a get-out-of-jail-free card for the governor.

That’s not what happened during Kavanaugh, and there were photos of Al Franken behaving inappropriately. More to the point, now fact-finding is should be the go-to mindset when it comes to these stories. I mean, I’m preaching to the choir here, but this is why the media is mocked and not trusted. The 180-degree turn on this when Democrats are targeted is beyond transparent, but you can appreciate the humor in this, I guess. It's a day that ends in "y."

The latest interview from one of Cuomo's alleged victims is pretty damning, but now the media is all about due process. If Cuomo were a Republican, you know how this would play out. 

 

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