Media dwell on Ted Cruz’s Cancun trip because he's Republican: Ari Fleischer
Former White House Press Secretary and Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer reacts on ‘The Faulkner Focus’ to the media’s response to Sen. Ted Cruz’s Cancun trip.
Politico declared Friday that the controversy surrounding Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's trip to Cancun amid a deadly winter storm in his home state of Texas marks the revival of the "age of political scandal" -- despite the growing legal woes facing Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over his handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest installment of the Politico Playbook featured a section labeled "THE RETURN OF THE WASHINGTON SCANDAL" in boldface type. The accompanying text posited that there is "something refreshingly normal" about the uproar surrounding Cruz's ill-timed vacation.
"A lot of observers wondered if the age of political scandal was dead — if partisans on both sides were so defined by hatred of their rival political tribe that they would let their own leaders get away with just about anything," it read. "And then a bearded man appearing to be Cruz was photographed with a roller bag at the United counter at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport ready to board a plane to Cancun."
A tweet from Politico promoting the Playbook read, "A lot of political observers wondered if the age of political scandal was dead. Ted Cruz proved this week that it isn't."
That claim led to a fierce backlash on social media.
"You mean Andrew Cuomo's scandal involving thousands of deaths, a cover-up, and an attempt at intimidation of critics didn't probe [sic] that for you? Good frickin' grief, @Politico, you should be embarrassed by this," HotAir senior editor Ed Morrissey reacted.
"According to Politico, this week's Andrew Cuomo news cycle isn't as scandalous as Ted Cruz going to Cancun," radio host Larry O'Connor tweeted.
TED CRUZ'S CANCUN TRIP FOCUS OF CNN, MSNBC PRIMETIME HOSTS, NOT CUOMO NURSING HOME SCANDAL
"You realize that you posted this at the end of week during which Gov. Cuomo was exposed to have purposefully hidden thousands of nursing home deaths that his policies caused and then threatened the well-being of a legislator who dared call him out for it, right?" TheBlaze senior editor Chris Field said.
"This is an astonishing tweet given social media companies and liberal networks quite literally worked to suppress a Hunter Biden scandal and took about 8 months to even utter Andrew Cuomo’s scandal. But they went all in on Cruz because he’s a Republican they don’t like," radio host Jason Rantz wrote.
Politico isn't the only news outlet to overplay the Cruz controversy as opposed to the Cuomo scandal. Prime-time hosts on CNN and MSNBC spent a whopping 46 total minutes to the Cancun trip on Thursday evening and fewer than three minutes on the nursing home scandal.
CNN, including star anchor Chris Cuomo, the brother of the embattled New York Democrat, have made an unprecedented push to downplay and deflect from the controversies surrounding Andrew Cuomo, with the far-left network giving developments in the nursing home scandal little to no airtime -- while giving the "Cuomo Prime Time" host free rein to conduct friendly, comical interviews with the scandal-plagued governor in the early months of the pandemic.
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Gov. Cuomo's administration is reportedly under investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn after critics accused officials of covering up the true number of COVID nursing home deaths in the state. Early in the pandemic, the governor ordered assisted living facilities to accept COVID-positive patients in order to keep hospital beds free.