SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

AMERICA'S GOVERNOR – FROM FOX:    New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s "rage & vindictiveness" have made former staffers "fearful to speak" about him as more accusations of sexual misconduct piled up against the Democrat, a reporter claimed Saturday night.  Shortly after two new bombshell stories about Cuomo appeared Saturday evening, a reporter who helped write one of them posted on Twitter that in a 10-year career she has never seen sources as frightened of potential retribution as former staffers of Cuomo appeared to be.  "I’ve been a reporter for a decade now, and I don’t think I have ever heard people as fearful to speak about someone as they are about Gov. Andrew Cuomo," Amy Brittain of The Washington Post wrote as she tweeted out the newspaper’s latest story on the embattled governor.  "Former staffers described his rage & vindictiveness & said they feared he would destroy their careers," she added.  In the Post story – for which Brittain shares a byline with journalists Josh Dawsey, Hannah Knowles and Tracy Jan (and three other contributors) – a former Cuomo press aide named Karen Hinton describes having been invited into a hotel room and embraced by the governor before she pulled away from him and left.  The same article adds that two male aides claimed Cuomo frequently berated them with harsh language and questioned their manhood.
All of the allegations in the article were denied by current Cuomo aides, with one referring to Hinton as a "known antagonist of the Governor’s" and the other saying he had "never" heard Cuomo use "coarse language."  The Post article also says former staffers contend Cuomo has a "Jekyll-and-Hyde" personality – charming at times and raging with anger at others.  And we're expected to believe that no liberal journalist knew anything about this man before women started coming forward.  But they naturally knew everything about Donald Trump.  Freedom of the press means nothing if we cannot trust the press.

SOME COURAGE MAYBE? – FROM COLLEGE FIX:   Theodor Geisel’s works as Dr. Seuss are going down the memory hole, scorned by his own descendants, after a relatively short pressure campaign branding them racist.  But at least the otherwise progressive author hasn’t suffered the ultimate insult from an institution of higher education.  Dartmouth College has “no plans to revisit the use of the Geisel name on campus,” Diana Lawrence, associate vice president for communications, wrote in a campuswide email cited by Inside Higher Ed. “We continue to explore opportunities to contextualize and educate from this chapter of the Geisel legacy.”  Its Geisel School of Medicine is named for Geisel and his wife Audrey and will remain that way, at least for now. Lawrence shows the common sense that’s often missing in higher education – that a few views deemed objectionable decades later shouldn’t cancel a person’s lasting accomplishment.  Of course not.  And if Dartmouth caved and removed Geisel's name?  How would that help the education of one black child?  And why don't we hear that question asked more often?

March 6, 2021