Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel speaks at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas in October 2023.

Let’s imagine, at least for a few paragraphs, that I decided it would be a good idea for this newspaper to hire former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to write a monthly freelance column on issues surrounding the topic of gender in the workplace. And I decided to announce it in a memo to staff that said, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like the former governor’s on the team,” since we’re in the middle of an election year in which one of the two major-party candidates is, like Cuomo, a Queens boy and former elected official who has vociferously denied multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

It is not unreasonable to imagine that this news would prompt criticism, perhaps even outrage, from Times Union staffers as well as many readers. One would imagine that Chris Churchill might use his thrice-weekly column to note that Cuomo’s freelance assignment involved issues on which the former governor should not be viewed as Mr. Credibility, and that — despite his immense respect for me as a journalist and a human being — Churchill had begun to suspect that I had “lost (my) ... mind.”

Let us then imagine that, having read Chris' column and spat coffee all over my kitchen counter, I reached out via text message to a few of Cuomo’s former flunkies and devoted loyalists and gauged their........

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