New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned Tuesday so it’s only a matter of time before some liberal in the media writes a sticky-sweet story about how unfair it is that Democrats hold themselves to a higher standard on sexual misconduct allegations than Republicans do.
Don’t fall for it. There’s no comparison between Cuomo, pretty much every other prominent Democrat, and anything faced by equally powerful Republicans.
Cuomo’s resignation comes after an exhausting report last week by the state attorney general concluding that he had sexually harassed and assaulted multiple state employees. She alleges that over a course of years, Cuomo had committed crimes, breaking laws on both the state and federal levels. She said that, over and over again.
Cuomo denies any wrongdoing, even while apologizing to the women who said he made them uncomfortable. One woman who works as an executive assistant in the governor’s office claimed that he grabbed her buttocks and breast in 2019 and 2020, respectively. That does sound uncomfortable.
But this isn’t simply the word of an accuser. This isn’t he-said, she-said. This is the result of an official, legal government investigation and the opinion of a Democrat state attorney general. And it was all but certain that without a voluntary resignation, the Democrat-controlled state legislature was going to impeach and remove him.
But liberals have tried changing course with the #MeToo monster they created by openly whining that their own leaders keep getting kneecapped with sexual harassment allegations while Republicans who face similar accusations brush them aside.
They tried to doing it with former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken. In 2019, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote that “being on the losing side of the #MeToo movement, which he fervently supports, has led [Franken] to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment, and the consequences of internet-fueled outrage.”
I’m sure. It’s easy to gain a renewed sense of nuance when the political weapon your party created blows up in your face. And yet that saccharine treatment of Franken by the New Yorker came only after Democrats and liberals in the press were unsuccessful in taking down a slew of Republicans with #MeToo claims, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and former President Donald Trump.
But people like Cuomo and Franken are precisely who the #MeToo movement should be addressing. Franken resigned after he was confronted with photographic evidence that he had placed his hands over the chest of an unconscious woman while mugging for the camera. He apologized to her and to a litany of other accusers who said he had touched them inappropriately. Cuomo is resigning because his own party was set to oust him anyway, and not for nothing— the Democrat New York attorney general had accused him of breaking the law on national television.
By contrast, investigations turned up nothing more than allegations for the Kavanaughs and the Trumps of the Republican Party. True, Democrats tried to make accusations in and of themselves a conviction but why should that mean the rest of us should adopt that same standard? Due process was good enough before and it remains the same now.
Democrats, with a helpful assist from the national media, will of course once again make noise about a double standard that doesn’t exist. Ignore the lie.
