Cuomo Dishes To Fred Dicker, Then Takes Back The Dish

Weird.

This morning, Fred Dicker wrote a column that supposedly came from a Cuomo source that said Andy was going to have Silver whacked from the Assembly for failure to get a hold on crooked Albany politicians and replaced with a more pliable lackey from Rochester.

Later in the day, Little Andy denied dishing dirt like that on Silver:

Governor Andrew Cuomo this morning denied that he was seeking to unseat Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as part of some sort of larger anti-corruption crusade in Albany.

"It is wholly up to the legislative bodies to select a leader," said Cuomo (who has been involved with the leadership question in the Senate, approving Republican-gerrymandered lines and tacitly blessing a coalition with breakaway Democrats that has kept the chamber out of Democratic hands). "I would never even for a moment try to influence that decision.”

Then he blamed Bloomberg for all the scandals:

In fact, according to Cuomo, the recent corruption allegations, which have directly involved two members of the state legislature, one councilman and two city Republican officials, actually have more to do with city malfeasance than the state's.

"In terms of Speaker Silver, remember again the context," he said. "First of all ... the majority of the actions and the players, it was about a New York City mayoral scandal. It was not an Albany scandal."

He also said, in an apparent allusion to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "It’s not that we don’t know the problems of getting on the ballot, the New York City mayoral problems. It’s not that we haven't had cases where people have been proven to be paying large sums of money to political parties and county chairs to try to get on the ballot in New York City. No, we know the problems and we know the solutions. We haven’t had the political will."

I find it hard to believe that the Dicker column came out of the ether.

Nice to see Little Andy take a new tack and try and tie the scandal to Mike "How Much Do You Want To Put Me On The Ballot" Bloomberg though.

Anything but taking responsibility for somebody close to him talking smack to Dicker.