Andrew Cuomo is trying to will his COVID-19 incompetence out of existence

The Democrat this week touted the release of a bit of state-sanctioned propaganda, heralding the Empire State’s supposedly victorious war against the coronavirus pandemic. The pro-Cuomo propaganda, it turns out, comes specifically in the form of a cluttered and mostly indecipherable poster.

“I love history. I love poster art,” the governor announced Monday. “Poster art is something they did in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when they had to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper. Over the past few years, I’ve done my own posters that capture that feeling.”

He adds, “I did a new one for what we went through with COVID, and I think the general shape is familiar to you. We went up the mountain, we curved the mountain, we came down the other side and these are little telltale signs that, to me, represent what was going on.”

The poster features as its centerpiece a mountain flanked on both sides by kitschy art and vague cultural references that most people certainly will not understand. But the lousy artwork and obscure references are not the worst of it. The worst of the poster is the mountain, which signifies the peak of infections in New York, where more than 32,000 people have already died from the virus. In other words, New York’s governor is memorializing, in the form of state-sponsored agitprop, the number of people who have died on his watch from COVID-19. And he is excited about it!

“New York Tough,” reads the poster’s headline. Its subhead adds, “Smart, United, Disciplined, Loving.” The mountain memorializing New York’s infections is, macabrely enough, topped with a banner that reads, “Love wins.” The poster also depicts Cuomo and his team with a caption that reads, “New York State leads again.” There are additional labels, including ones denoting the “Winds of Fear,” the “Sea of Division,” and the “Boyfriend Cliff,” whatever the hell that is, some think it may have something to do with the governor’s daughter’s boyfriend, whose name is not Cliff.

Worst of all the labels, however, are three small ones found in the poster’s bottom right corner, touting infection increases in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Because nothing says “love wins” quite like cheering case increases in fellow states, which by the way, all got the virus from New York.

Though it is tempting to see Cuomo’s victory lap poster as merely an act of tone-deaf idiocy, it is actually quite cunning. Indeed, the governor is likely counting on the reasonable assumption that the corporate media, much of which have worked hard already to present the governor as some sort of heroic, selfless leader amid the pandemic, will not call him on his undeserved declaration of victory.

Cuomo’s political enemies can remind people all they want that his administration is responsible for New York’s nursing home death toll, which is the worst of any state in the union. But so long as the governor can set the narrative that he actually did a great job responding to the virus, and that narrative goes largely unchallenged by the press, then those legitimate criticisms of his bungling of the pandemic will be like water crashing on a rock. This poster is not a mere act of idiocy or callousness on Cuomo’s behalf. It is part of a larger effort to rewrite the history of his complicity in the state’s staggering death toll, and Cuomo is betting, likely correctly, that our vaunted Fourth Estate will give him yet another pass.