What’s really interesting about the early jousting within the GOP for the top 2024 spot is that the rats are beginning to jump ship, even though the ship doesn’t yet seem to be going down.
All right, so Trump talked to a half-empty hall at CPAC, but that says more about CPAC slowly dying than it says anything about Trump. In fact, the polls show Trump still ahead of all the competition, even if it’s still too early to put any real significance into any poll result.
On the other hand, when someone like Kellyanne Conway basically turns her back on Trump, as she did in a recent Fox interview, it may signal the beginning of the end for Trump’s political career, or at least a career promoted by Conway and other political pros who know how to read the tea leaves, so to speak.
That being said, the advice that Conway gave DeSantis in her interview, which was probably an effort to get herself on the short list for the DeSantis team, was so incredibly stupid that I can only hope her comments become the basic DeSantis narrative which will guarantee a 2024 win for Joe.
Here’s what she said: “Talk a little bit more about the economic miracle in Florida. Make America Florida.”
Now it’s true that the unemployment rate in Florida is under 3 percent. On the other hand, the state’s per capita GDP happens to be 20 percent below the national, per capita average, which means that a lot of those employed Floridians are working for minimum wage.
Florida also now has a law, passed in 2022 and championed by DeSantis, which copies the Mississippi law that bans just about all abortions after 15 weeks.
And when I comes to banning things, Florida recently banned the black history course that was being offered in public high schools, even though it was developed by the College Board, which is only the educational operation whose tests are used to help determine admissions to just about every college in the United States.
But students in Florida don’t need no stinkin’ black history courses, they also don’t need access to any curricular materials on gender and sexual identity, thanks to another law pushed by DeSantis last year.
Those of you who are old enough to be collecting social security may recall that the whole cultural war thing started in Florida when Anita Bryant decided to stop making those dopey, country-rock songs and led what was ultimately a failed effort to overturn a pro-gay ordnance passed in Dade County.
Florida was also the first state to pass a Stand Your Ground law which allows someone who believes that he or she is facing a physical threat to pull out the old shootin’ iron and bang away rather than backing down.
So, this is what Kellyanne Conway would like to see occur in all fifty states: No abortions, no teaching about slavery in public schools, take books off the school library shelves written by gay authors like James Baldwin and Truman Capote and burn the goddamn things.
In other words, the woman who defined the Trump Administration’s communication strategy as ‘alternative facts,’ is now in the process of creating an alternative reality for what life should be like throughout the United States.
Rather than react to Kellyanne by telling everyone that she’s just a dumb shit, I am going to send her a note telling her to keep promoting Florida as the embodiment of Orwell’s 1984 with the hopes that Ron DeSantis will use this narrative to define his 2024 campaign.
Because if he does, he’ll probably win enough GOP primaries to wrest the party’s leadership away from shithead Trump, and then will lead the GOP to its most crushing defeat since Goldwater went up against LBJ in 1964.
The night that Anita Bryant held her first, big rally in Florida to overturn Dade County’s anti-gay law, I happened to be eating in a restaurant on the corner of Broadway and 21st Street in New York City. All of a sudden there was a huge noise and commotion out in the street, and when I looked out the front window of the restaurant, I saw this huge, parade of gay and straight men and women marching up Broadway to hold an enormous rally in Times Square.
This spontaneous show of support for the gay lifestyle occurred in cities all over the country that night. And this was 1977, just a few years after New York City held its first Gay Rights parade. In 2005, I happened to drive through Fargo, ND, the day of the city’s Gay Rights parade. This Was Fargo, not Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s Castro District, okay?
If the best the GOP can throw at Joe is that he’s not joining their anti-woke campaign, they’ll get their asses handed to them in 2024.
Is that so bad?
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