We like to think of ourselves as enlightened people who try,
especially in politics, not to judge people by our first
impressions. Take President Carter … please.
Our first impression of him was not good. Putting aside that we
were not crazy about having a President whose first name was
“Jimmy” (and still hope to have the rest of the world believe that
the outhouse was not a fixture of American culture), when we first
saw candidate Carter, he was wearing brown socks with a blue suit.
“So what,” we said, still prepared to be open-minded. We were
hiring a President, not a tailor. And maybe he was colorblind,
which would not effect his ability to be President except for
matters of the budget, when he has to be able to tell the red ink
from the black. And what happened? Our first impression was right.
We ended up waiting on lines at the gas stations — and we didn’t
even own a car.
Then came Clinton. When we saw him we felt that he was the kind
of person who would give used car salesmen a bad name. Then he was
elected. We understood that the business of the government was
being conducted in the Oval Office, but did it have to be on the
carpet of the Oval Office?
With Clinton, we tried to look at the positive side of things,
and were prepared to be generous in our judgment. Adultery, so
what? It takes ten minutes to commit adultery and he had the whole
rest of the day to be President. And what finally happened? It
turned out he did to the rest of the country what he was doing to
his girl friends.
Andrew Cuomo first came to our attention when he married Robert
F. Kennedy’s daughter, Kerry.
Our first impression of the Kennedys was visceral and goes back
two generations before Kerry. Old man Joe, Kerry’s grandfather,
founded the house of Kennedy by a political marriage with Rose
Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston’s mayor “Honey Fitz.” Joe believed
in “family” to such a degree that he openly had one family with
Rose and another home with film star Gloria Swanson.
What soured us on Joe, though, were his political positions, not
the ones in his bedroom. He became U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain
in 1937 until he was forced to resign in 1940. His continued praise
of Hitler and exhortations for us to drop our support for England
in the early days of World War II became an international
embarrassment.
Joe Kennedy was not just a Nazi lover, he was also a racist, as
described by Frank Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, in his new book,
Mr. S.
“He [Kennedy] referred to the august Louis B. Mayer as a ‘kike
junkman.’ The Jewish jokes didn’t stop. The worst one I can recall:
‘What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza doesn’t
cry on its way to the oven.’”
Jacobs, to whom he was talking, was a black man. But he was also
Jewish, having been Bar Mitzvahed in Israel, which goes to show
that Kennedy was dumb as well as bigoted.
When it came to Andrew Cuomo, what has been revealed in the last
few days confirmed our original impression of him, which was not
very favorable. In order to buy votes for the Clinton
Administration, as Clinton’s Secretary of Housing, this professed
liberal dangled, then gave, then withheld, federal funds for New
York housing. Can there really be anybody lower than a person who
professes to be a liberal, concerned about the plight of poor
people, and then, when in a position where he could really do some
good for these unfortunate people, uses his power to further his
own and his party’s political ends.
We were also turned off when, trying to run for Governor of New
York, he shoved his wife Kerry and even his children in the face of
the voters at every opportunity. Little did we then know that this
was the ultimate scam because, at the same time, their marriage
was, in fact, a sham. She had a boyfriend, Cuomo was calling her
every possible insulting name, and yet they sought to present
themselves as a model — the ultimate political couple to the
voters of New York. Of course, he had a great role model in Clinton
who, with Hillary, was the gold standard for political marriages.
Their marriage had everything a marriage could want — thievery,
crookedness, adultery, violence, and phoney religiosity — in
short, a marriage made in heaven.
But Cuomo was also able to do something that even Tony Soprano
would not do. Initially, he released reports that his wife betrayed
him and then, in case anybody did not know how she betrayed him,
explained that she was an adulterer. After having done all of this,
like a man who kills his parents and complains he is an orphan, he
then bemoaned the fact that their three children had to find out
about it.
Worse yet, Kerry is apparently an amateur at the adultery game
— she should have taken lessons from her relatives. After her
husband called her an adulteress, her boyfriend then said that he
will stay with his wife, and wants no part of Kerry.
If a conservative did all of these things, he would be reviled
as the lowest person who ever lived. Since Cuomo is a liberal, he
is simply a chip off the old block.
