Ron DeSantis Gonna Pivot His Way From Lying About Slavery To Lying About Abortion
It is fun watching him lose, though.
We hate to kick a guy when he’s down, but we’ll always make an exception when it’s Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor’s presidential campaign is going up in flames like Ben Shapiro’s Barbie collection. He had to fire that aide who was into twisted Nazi imagery. Then he had to fire even more staff so he could avoid flying commercial.
Shelby Talcott at Semafor reports that the DeSantis campaign has decided to reset, reboot, and really focus on policy, and if that sounds like the song of the truly desperate, your ears aren’t misleading you, unlike DeSantis. She writes, “DeSantis has been previewing this pivot, noting during a recent press conference that his team will be putting together ‘a vision for the economy’ and ‘a big rollout on national security.’”
Yeah, MAGA voters don’t care about that crap. Besides, this “reboot” still keeps Ron DeSantis as the candidate, and that’s the campaign’s one, insurmountable problem.
There’s also the undeniable reality that DeSantis sucks at policy. He’s good at bullying vulnerable people like a less-appealing Biff Tannen, but he can’t articulate a well-considered opinion on any serious matter. Back in May, Trey Gowdy asked him directly what distinguished him from the other Republicans running for president — “Is it policy differences or is it more about electability and how you’d implement those policies?” — and DeSantis just stared at him like he was constipated, which admittedly is his standard resting face.
When Gowdy asked him how he’d address the war in Ukraine, DeSantis just served up his stale “war on woke” talking points.
“I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized,” he said. “You talk about gender ideology. You talk about things like global warming, that they're somehow concerned and that's not the military that I served in.”
Yes, the sitting governor of Florida, where ocean temperatures have surpassed 100 degrees and coral reefs are dying, dismisses climate change as an irrelevant issue. He’s too busy promoting the positives of slavery.
But DeSantis really flopped around like a dead fish off the Florida coast during a recent interview with CNN’s Jack Tapper, who asked him if he’d support a federal abortion ban as president. (DeSantis has already signed into law a grotesque six-week ban in Florida.)
Instead of answering the question directly, he spouted some nonsense about how he’d be a “pro-life” president and claimed the real “danger from Congress is if we lose the election, they’re going to try to nationalize abortion up until the moment of birth.”
There’s zero risk of this, even under the most liberal Democratic Congress, but DeSantis wasn’t done lying yet.
“In some liberal states,” he said, “you actually have post-birth abortions and I think that’s wrong.”
There is no such thing as a “post-birth abortion.” What DeSantis is describing is infanticide, which is murder and illegal in all states. Yes, Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law notoriously enables (Black) child-killing but that’s probably not what he meant.
Republicans have long made the “post-birth abortion” lie. Donald Trump in particular would describe what sounded more like sinister black mass ceremonies than actual medical procedures. These ghouls are deliberately misrepresenting forms of palliative care for newborns who are not expected to survive long after birth. It’s a horrific time for the family, and only the worst examples of human scum would present this tragedy as some cold-blooded “execution.”
This is why we’re not bullish on a supposed DeSantis “pivot.” It would require that he become a dramatically different (and better) person, and that’s just impossible.
[WIRN]
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Talk, WIRN link above:
"No state allows post-birth abortions," said Lois Shepard, a University of Virginia law and biomedical ethics professor who has authored several books about end of life care. "First, an abortion refers to terminating a pregnancy, and a pregnancy does not continue after birth. But second, that would be killing a born human being, who is a person entitled to the equal protection of the laws, including prohibitions against murder. No state permits infanticide."
/FFS