“Every country,” said 17th-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre, “has the government it deserves.”

It’s hard to beat Maistre’s scathing indictment of the collective idiocy of the mob, especially when one’s countrymen have just elected a lying, backslapping, money-grubbing, 78-year-old ChiCom stooge. But it’s harder still to argue that the people of New York deserved Andrew Cuomo.

No one deserves Andrew Cuomo. Least of all, the state’s elderly citizens.

As the New York Post reports, “New York’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 may be more than 50 percent higher than officials claim — because Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration hasn’t revealed how many of those residents died in hospitals, state Attorney General Letitia James [herself a hard leftist] announced Thursday. In a damning, 76-page report, James also said that some unidentified nursing homes apparently underreported resident fatalities to the state Department of Health and failed to enforce infection-control measures — with more than 20 currently under investigation.”

This wasn’t some little bookkeeping error by the state’s “officials,” either. Everyone knows how deadly this virus is in a nursing home, and everyone knows how badly it hit New York. As for the Cuomo administration’s grievous undercounting, the Post notes that the current DOH tally could go from 8,711 deaths to more than 13,000.

Way back in April. That’s when we first smelled a rat in Albany. And then in August, Cuomo dug in his heels against getting to the bottom of what happened in his state’s group-home facilities and nursing homes. “No, I wouldn’t do an investigation,” he said. “Whether or not it’s political, everybody can make that decision for themselves. I think you’d have to be blind to realize it’s not political. … It’s kind of incredible.”

Notice the condescension and the indignation. It’s kind of incredible that you’d even ask such a question, you right-wing Associated Press hack.

Why, it’s almost as if he’d been hiding something. Almost as if the Cuomo administration had been trying to cover up a catastrophic policy that kept shoving the state’s coronavirus-positive elderly folks back into nursing homes, where the deadly contagion could spread like wildfire.

And what kind of grotesque accounting trick is it to count only those residents who die on nursing home property rather than those who get whisked away to a hospital in the nick of time, there to die on a cold gurney instead of a warm bed?

Cuomo finally rescinded his disastrous nursing home order on May 10, but how many lives had been unnecessarily snuffed out by then? Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean has, understandably, made it her mission to find out:

Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell has seen and heard enough of Andrew Cuomo. “Monster, sociopath, human emetic, take your pick,” she said. “My guess is that his political career is over. Maybe his bro can get him a job on TV.”

To that point, if you’re looking for this story on CNN, you’ve gone to the wrong place. Even if you find it, you’ll see only a fleeting reference to the man most responsible for New York’s COVID calamity. Nine paragraphs in, we read, “The Department of Health and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office did not immediately respond to CNN’s requests for comment.” That’s it. That’s all we hear about Andrew Cuomo.

And why might that be?

Might it be because New York’s Emmy Award-winning governor had been yukking it up on CNN with his brother Chris all throughout the pandemic, and doing tone-deaf victory laps, and showing off his cartoonish mountain-of-death poster, and promoting his so-called leadership book?

“The attorney general’s report shows that Cuomo’s book on his great leadership during the pandemic is a fraud,” said Vivian Zayas, who lost her mom in a Long Island nursing home last year. “It’s a fraud and insult to the families. He’s a fraud and his book is a fraud.”

One thing we can say about Andrew Cuomo’s leadership, though: He sure knows how to pass the buck. As if to prove the point, he appeared on both CNN and MSNBC earlier this week to take another shameless swipe at President Donald Trump. “Incompetent government kills people,” he said. “More people died than needed to die in COVID. That’s the truth.”

Talk about an ill-timed outburst. It’s the truth all right, but not for the reasons Cuomo would have us believe.

Why is it that leftists always blame others for the things that they themselves are most guilty of?

Update: Cuomo’s response to the report: “Who cares? They died!”

His point is that it doesn’t matter where they died but that they died. Even so, he’s channeling his inner Hillary Clinton, with her exasperated proclamation, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”