Don't Lie to Me by Jeanine Pirro

Author:Jeanine Pirro [JEANINE PIRRO, JUDGE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

During the first days of quarantine, we all had our guilty pleasures, especially when it came to television. Some of us spent our days binge-watching every episode of Tiger King, an eight-part documentary about a man in Oklahoma who kept exotic animals chained up in his yard and hired a hit man to take out one of his rival animal keepers. Others preferred the comfort of reality television, watching the Kardashians or the Real Housewives get into tightly scripted scrapes with one another. Toward the end of spring, there was even a new show about an aging presidential candidate who sits in his basement trying to figure out how a webcam works. Sadly, that one has been renewed for a second season, and we’ll be watching it all the way through to November.

For liberals, however, there was nothing better than sitting down in the late morning sunshine, frothy lattes and vegan protein shakes in hand, to watch Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York deliver his strange, rambling monologue of the day. Like a B-list soap opera actor who has long since passed his prime, Governor Cuomo was everywhere you looked during those first few months of the pandemic, always happy to launch into a dramatic, self-congratulatory speech. If you happened to be sheltering in place in New York or its surrounding areas during the pandemic, as I was for many months, Governor Cuomo was almost harder to avoid than the deadly coronavirus itself.

Was he really a great leader during that time? Not by a longshot. But he did get pretty good at playing one on television.

During a long-winded speech at the Javits Center on March 30, for instance, Cuomo launched into a long, well-rehearsed riff on a famous speech from William Shakespeare’s Henry V, no doubt getting a few lonely liberal housewives all hot and bothered as they watched from home.

“This is a moment that is going to change this nation,” he said, pausing for effect like he was expecting the dramatic music to begin at any second. “This is a moment that forges character, forges people, changes people, makes them stronger, makes them weaker… Ten years from now, you’ll be talking about today to your children or your grandchildren, and you will shed a tear because you will remember the lives lost. You’ll remember the faces, and you’ll remember the names, and you’ll remember how hard we worked and that we still lost loved ones.”1

Did you hear the swelling music? Feel the tears beginning to roll down your cheeks?

Yeah, me neither.

Maybe it’s because this speech, like so much of what Governor Cuomo has been doing since the day he gave his first briefing on the coronavirus—or, as the governor self-righteously insisted on calling it for a while, the “European virus”—was nothing more than a well-staged piece of political theater.2 I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam “lying sack of” Schiff, the failed screenwriter turned congressional witch hunter in chief, helped him workshop the script.

From the beginning, these briefings were all flash, style, and flourish, full of nothing but lies and fun set pieces.

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