In Defense of Andrew Cuomo
(We can have leaders like Cuomo, or we can be led by simpering fools who melt before adversity)
By
David Gottfried
The Lords and Ladies of Feminism are virtually unanimous in their judgement: Andrew Cuomo is a nasty boy for messing around with women, and he must be impeached or even incarcerated.
Of course, one could strip government of nasty people, of argumentative people, of people who like to pinch asses and of people who are relentlessly horny. Indeed, we could fill our governments with aged, decrepit half-men, with no sex drive and no self-confidence, perhaps men like Marshall Petain, the leader of the traitorous French regime known as Vichy France which collaborated with Adolf Hitler during World War Two.
Very simply, great men are often men with large appetites. Winston Churchill led Britain against Hitler when Britain stood alone, when neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would fight Hitler, and Hitler was poised to conquer the world. Churchill’s resistance to Hitler was part and parcel of his essentially ribald, rowdy and macho temperament. He was, in many ways, a wild man. When he was a journalist, he at times found reporting on a war boring and so he participated as a combatant. He drank hard liquor several times per day, all through the day. When a certain woman told him he was frightfully drunk, he retorted with characteristic acidity:
“Yes, I am rather drunk. But tomorrow I will be sober. However, you, my dear woman, will still be frightfully ugly.”
I suppose that today’s feminists would have faulted him for creating a hostile work environment. (Hell, half of the bosses I have known screamed like fish mongers at the Fulton Street Fish Market, or Jackie Gleason in “The Honeymooners” or Leona Helmsley). Perhaps they would have much preferred a sweet- tempered eunuch like Neville Chamberlain who pranced around in silk knee breeches while letting Hitler help himself to Czechoslovakia.
Neville and other nellie people remind me of a saying that seems to be a hallmark of our feminist world: “plays well with others.” This is the winning attribute of modern, urban America.
Nowadays, consensus – playing well with others -- is adored while courage is deplored. In schools, children are taught to find the answers to questions in a group, and in their Stalinoid conformity to group-think a man’s once lucid mind becomes as mushy as that of a milquetoast.
Nowadays, it is more important to defer to Tzarina Letitia James, the attorney general of New York who denounced Cuomo with all the bluster of Eva Peron, than to be right.
Nowadays, it is more important to listen to and automatically believe the “women” than to be right.
In this vein, consider the Kennedys. Sometime in the 1970’s, I started hearing feminists say, almost on a daily basis, that the Kennedys were womanizers. Perhaps they were.
And perhaps you should all GET ON YOUR GODDMAN KNEES and that G-d for giving us Jack and Bobby Kennedy. I say this not on the basis of severe sixties nostalgia (although I plead guilty to that infirmity) but because of relatively recent revelations from the Kremlin about the Cuban missile crisis.
These Kremlin files show that at the time Kennedy appeared on US television, and announced that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba, some of those missiles were fully operational.
When Kennedy met with his advisors, they had to decide whether to bomb Cuba, to blockade (or “quarantine”) Cuba, or to make furious speeches but essentially do nothing (doing nothing seems cowardly to jingoistic American ears but Russia did nothing about our missiles in Turkey and Russia’s inaction did not harm Russia)
Most of the Men who Kennedy met with wanted to immediately bomb Cuba. However, think of what may have happened given that some of the missile sites, and missiles, were fully operational:
If we did not take out every last one of the sites which were operational (And we did not even know that some of them were operational let alone know whcre the operational sites were), an operational site, which had not been taken out, may very well have then lobbed a nuclear missile at the United States. If an American city had endured something on the order of a Hiroshima, only much worse as nuclear weapons were getting stronger and stronger, the United States would have probably tried to nuke the Soviet Union, who would try to nuke the United States (And isn’t this deliciously satisfying: If we all die, we don’t have to worry about getting into Harvard.)
You may think that I am exaggerating the risk of nuclear war. However, in the early sixties, some people seemed to have had a yen for Armageddon. For example, consider what the conservatives in the United States were bloviating about: William Buckley, the premier conservative theorist in America, wrote, in 1962 or so, that we must fight communism with all our resources even if such a fight would lead to collective annihilation in nuclear war. Buckley explicitly said that mass death through nuclear war was a worthwhile price to pay in the fight against communism. I don’t remember his exact words, but I do recall that there was almost a religious quality to his end-of-days hysteria. Buckley always professed to endeavor to be an ardent and uncompromising Roman Catholic, and in his slavish desire to fight the Communists, mushroom clouds be damned, he reminded me of Catholic friends of mine, in Grade School, whose Catholicism was all-enveloping, as it was in my friend Bruce G who said, with complete seriousness, that he never, ever missed an episode of the sit com “The Flying Nun.”
However, the Kenncdys withstood the demand for a first strike attack on Cuba. They may very well have saved the earth from nuclear annihilation. But I am sure that the feminist contingent would have disqualified the Kennedys from the presidency because John was a horny, lecherous man. (I should qualify this by noting that most historians say that it was Robert Kennedy who mightily strived to avoid a military conflagration and that, to my knowledge, Robert was not chasing women outside of marriage.)