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It must be slimeball rehabilitation week.
First, disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, then his one-time Democratic rival, disgraced former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, made a pitch for redemption.
Next we’ll have Anthony Weiner running for governor, and Jeff Zucker heading to Spotify. Pity that Harvey Weinstein is in jail for a few millennia.
Too soon, creeps. Way too soon.
Just six months after he resigned over sexual harassment allegations from 11 women, Cuomo, 64, popped up in Bloomberg this week claiming he feels “vindicated” and refusing to rule out another run for office.
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece saying he might even be plotting a run against his tormentor, current AG Letitia James. All this in the wake of his first public appearance in Manhattan last week, when he dined with Mayor Adams.
Ugh.
Then along comes Schneiderman, 67, featured Wednesday in a long soft-soap feature on BuzzFeed titled: “Eric Schneiderman Says He’s Changed. Is That Enough?”
“Self-discovery”
The story dwells on his efforts with meditation, therapy, rehab, self-discovery and co-founding of a “feminist book club,” and his complaints about his law license being suspended.
Despite the multiple caveats inserted in the copy and his vow not to run for office again, this is the obvious first stage in a reputation refurbishment operation — and his victims are not impressed.
Schneiderman was forced to resign in 2018 as New York’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer after four women alleged he was a violent drunk who had repeatedly physically abused them.
Quoted in a New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow, they claimed he slapped and choked them and threatened to kill them, as well as mocked their appearance and told one woman, who was born in Sri Lanka, that she was his “brown slave.”
He resigned three hours after the story was published, but denied assaulting the women, claiming he simply had engaged in “role-playing and other consensual sexual activity . . . in the privacy of intimate relationships.” In other words, it was their fault.
The New York DA appointed by then-Gov. Cuomo to investigate Schneiderman chose not to press charges, but his law license was suspended last April, after he admitted that he had slapped three of his former girlfriends and squeezed the necks of two of them.
His downfall was all the more scandalous because he was a darling of liberal New York and had portrayed himself as a feminist champion, a vocal proponent of the #MeToo movement, and Donald Trump’s nemesis.
Like so many Democrats, he was guilty of psychological projection, accusing others of the sins he liked to commit, buying himself protection and the adulation of New York’s liberal milieu by pretending to be the opposite of what he is.
Now, almost four years later, he figures he’s spent enough time in the wilderness, and it’s time for a comeback. Yet he has never apologized to any of the women he admits abusing.
According to BuzzFeed, he thought of the assaults as “rough sex.”
“The way he saw it, some of the women he dated were into choking, slapping and dark role-play, and some weren’t.”
But now Schneiderman realizes that “it wasn’t right to have engaged in what he had thought of as ‘rough sex’ without clear rules in advance . . . and that he ‘had consent wrong.’ ”
Manhattan feminist activist and author Michelle Manning Barish, one of the women Schneiderman admitted abusing, says the BuzzFeed story is just “a p.r. strategy to resurrect a perpetrator’s career” and get back his law license.
“Whitewashing the sins of Eric Schneiderman may make for clickbait; but those who enable him are complicit in his future predatory acts,” she said in a statement provided to The Post.
“Survivors relive their trauma each day. Now, rather than helping protect them, BuzzFeed enables a monster in vilifying his four victims.”
Victim a whistleblower
Manning Barish, a stunning redhead who dated Schneiderman on and off for 18 months, was one of the courageous whistleblowers who talked to The New Yorker on the record in a bid to protect other women from Schneiderman’s cruelty.
She does not want to relive the trauma of her association with the powerful older man, but she is afraid he will try to run for governor if his victims don’t speak up.
She has the support of Earlene Hooper, who was Democratic deputy speaker of the State Assembly for 12 years.
“I cannot endorse, support or vote any man who conducts himself in this manner,” she said in response to the BuzzFeed story.
“As an elected official, I have seen power used to abuse women. My answer is NO to this attempted resurrection.”
Staten Island Republican Congresswoman Nicole Malliotaks weighed in Wednesday as well, pointing out that after four New York Democratic politicians in 15 years have resigned in disgrace for “everything from domestic violence, sexual harassment, prostitution and financial impropriety and bribery . . . we deserve elected officials who won’t abuse their power — or other people — for personal gain.”
To be fair, Schneiderman and Cuomo must look at Joe Biden in the White House and think, “Heck, if he can become president after Tara Reade and the plagiarism and everything else, there has to be a chance for me.”
Wouldn’t it be fun if they both put up their hands for the 2024 election as the Democratic candidate?
Popcorn time for sure.
Someone is clearly on crack
We knew Hunter Biden was the president’s closest political adviser.
But this is ridiculous. Handing out free crack pipes?
Next Joe Biden will be providing free Russian hookers and M&M’s.
Well, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, the news that crack pipes are going to be included in “safe smoking kits” handed out to addicts and funded by Health and Human Services, is fake news.
“They were never a part of the kit; it was inaccurate reporting,” she told reporters yesterday.
HHS also issued a statement denying pipes would be issued to drug addicts, two days after an unnamed HHS spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon the kits would include pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine and “any illicit substance” as part of “harm reduction” efforts.
So, hang on a minute. What exactly is in the “safe smoking kit/supplies” that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will be funding nonprofits to give to addicts? Lip balm and alcohol swabs, according to Psaki. Strange, considering everywhere else in the world, from Europe to Canada, and even Seattle and San Francisco, “safe smoking kits” contain crack pipes.
In fact, free crack pipes are the latest imperative of the drug liberalization, aka harm minimization, crowd. An article in the September 2020 issue of The International Journal of Drug Policy advocates their distribution in the UK, as an urgent response to the COVID-19.
Psaki scolded reporters pressing her on the story yesterday: “We are losing an American life every five minutes to overdose. We don’t have time for political games.”
But if the administration actually cared about overdose deaths, it would not encourage addicts to keep using and it would do something to stop the huge increase in fentanyl coming across Biden’s porous southern border.
Source: NYPOST
