“Hi Bob, got a question for you.”

“Yes, Andy.”

“How many thousands of nursing home patients can you kill before it impedes your presidential chances?”

“Gee, Andy, that’s a tough one. For a Democrat. you’d probably have to get to a million before it becomes a problem.”

And, in entirely unrelated news, New York has released a report exonerating itself for killing 6% of its nursing home residents. 

Even the AP is rolling its eyes. And that says a lot in these times.

New York hospitals released more than 6,300 recovering coronavirus patients into nursing homes during the height of the pandemic under a controversial, now-scrapped policy, state officials said Monday, but they argued it was not to blame for one of the nation’s highest nursing home death tolls.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration, which has taken intense criticism over the policy, instead contended the virus’ rampant spread through the state’s nursing homes was propelled by more than 20,000 infected home staffers, many of whom kept going to work unaware they had the virus in March and April. Another 17,500 workers were infected through early June.

So the argument that the sociopath in Albany is making is that it was okay for him to force 6,000 coronavirus patients into nursing homes because… there were already lots of workers infected with coronavirus and they probably did most of the killing.

That’s like setting someone’s house on fire and claiming it’s okay because he probably already had cancer.

Except that there’s a huge difference between symptomatic and asymptomatic and taking people who had already been hospitalized and moving them into nursing homes was evil and insane. And, there was absolutely no call for it. The Cuomo defense is that the horrible thing he did is retroactively okay, because the state had also messed up by allowing a bunch of infected workers to be working in nursing homes too, even as it put the entire healthy population under house arrest under pain of being arrested.

Correction. That’s like arguing that it’s okay to set Bob’s house on fire because you already accidentally poisoned him.

This is Governor Cuomo’s actual defense.

“Facts matter. And those are the facts,” state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said in a news conference.

The Cuomo administration didn’t release how exactly they reached the report’s conclusions, which back up Cuomo’s repeated defenses. And the report has its limits: it only looks at the number of residents who died inside nursing homes and not at hospitals, for example.

This is the AP rolling its eyes.

Cuomo noted Monday that it wasn’t well understood early on how readily the virus could be spread by people without symptoms.

“Nobody knew what they were talking about for a long time. That’s the bottom line here,” he told reporters in New York.

So Cuomo’s excuse is that he was incompetent, had no idea what he was doing, but please listen to him now.

The health commissioner said there was “no reason to place blame” on anyone.

“If you were to place blame, I would blame coronavirus,” Zucker said.

If you were wondering whether we were ruled by sociopaths, you have your answer.