Silly Rabbits!
Ron DeSantis Trix Are For Kids
Sorry, I’m not writing a full-on midterms summary piece. One of the beauties of being my own editor, as well as my sole contributor, is that I don’t have to. My full masthead - me, myself, and I, the Holy Trinity if you will - had an editorial meeting this morning, and decided against. So instead, we took our dog for a walk in the woods to catch the dwindling remnants of this season’s magnificent fall foliage, which is nearly gone. (To get in that spirit, here’s last year’s piece on the wonders of autumn/Thoreau’s Autumnal Tints.) Catch the season while you can. Winter is coming, in more ways than one.
In any case, you can read one of those midterms recaps literally everywhere else on the internet. Happy reading. By which I mean, sad reading. Yes, the bullet-headed-seditionist-dildo, Doug Mastriano, lost in Pennsylvania. (Good times.) But election-denier Kari Lake is still in the hunt. Color me paranoid, but I still have real fears that we will all be working for her one day. On a troll farm. Hoeing our rows, sowing seeds of distrust in the lamestream media, which keeps pointing out that she’s a false prophet – since about a half a second ago, she was a liberal abortion-loving Buddhist who used to have drag queens over to her house to perform in front of her children, before she became a MAGA poster girl. In other words, she’s a gold-plated phony, making her the perfect creature of her time, poised for future electoral success even if she fails this go. But before she becomes our maximum leader, please enjoy her abject humiliation at the hands of Cecily Strong, who perfectly captures her phoniness. The real fun starts around the 2:50 mark.
What you’re probably already reading elsewhere is a lot of dopey analysis (no hyperlinks, sorry – I don’t wish to single anyone out for foolish wishful thinking after our long national nightmare) that holds that Ron DeSantis is about to wrest control of the party from Donald J. Trump, on account of the predicted Red Wave being more like a modest red eddy. As if Trump will suffer for this setback. After he already hasn’t suffered for losing two popular votes, the electoral college (in 2020), and helping lose the House and the Senate when they were on his presidential watch. Not to mention encouraging his own Capitol to be sacked, and his vice president hanged. So good luck with that theory. I don’t share it.
Here’s mine:
As regular readers of this site know, I don’t like Trump or DeSantis, even a little. But those who are pretending DeSantis is about to pry control of the party out of Trump’s stubby fingers, based on midterms, are dreaming. DeSantis beat Charlie Crist by 20 points in Florida. But Trump is not Charlie Crist – and he is still beating DeSantis by 30 points in 2024 primary polls. Even if DeSantis is the better on-paper match-up to take on Biden (or whoever Biden’s successor is if Biden succumbs to assisted living before then). DeSantis, if he is to win, ultimately has to break off adherents to a personality cult, when the cultist-in-chief is still alive and kicking, and is already pillorying Ron DeSantis to his sheeple. DeSantis is pretty good about taking on everyone from the Miami Herald to Disney. But has he demonstrated any will to take on the ideological folk hero that he’s doing a poor man’s impression of? Not likely.
Which means, unless DeSantis changes his ways, he doesn’t leave Trumpsters much choice but to choose Trump. Because the dirty truth is that DeSantis is as afraid of Trump voters as is the rest of his party. Is Kevin McCarthy, even if he becomes Speaker of the House, going to stand up against Donald Trump, even in the interest of pragmatic x’s and o’s and for electoral advantage? Of course he isn’t! McCarthy is a simpering coward. He is Trump’s literal Starburst sorter. And DeSantis has served as his figurative one. It’s hard for the servant to become the master, especially when the master is still servicing the masturbators.
So if you think Trump’s over? Guess again, daydream believers.
There are only three things that can stop Trump in Republicanville, as it is currently constituted:
1. Law enforcement. (Trump is still facing multiple potential indictments.)
2. Big Mac clots in his heart.
3. Moderate voters who will beat his tangelo ass like a drum in a general election.
But that’s just one man’s opinion. I could be wrong. (Even if I’m usually not.) You’re entitled to your own, and I encourage you to express it in the comments below, even if I’m limiting this to paid subscribers, in the interest of keeping things civil. (Don’t curse each other, or I’ll bounce you.) And if you’re not a paid subscriber, you are, of course, encouraged to become one, with all the privileges that entails.
In the meantime, I will be working on my real midterms piece: my odyssey with my former brother-in-law, who just re-ran for the Mayor of North Beach, MD. Where real work gets done by real people, unlike so much of what happens on our national stage, with all its fake people. (Coming soon.)
Bonus Track: World Party pretty much captured the tenor of our times, even if this is a 32-year-old song. “Way Down Now”:
You summed up my thoughts remarkably well, Matt.
I mentioned to a close friend yesterday that I would be relieved when the election would be done and dusted, and everyone who’d been running about with their hair on fire would at least have an opportunity to realize that no, the election wasn’t the equivalent of the breaking of the seventh seal, or the cue for Godzilla to come up from the depths and rule the globe, or whatever their favorite nightmare scenarios might have been. Nor, indeed, was it a Scarlet Tsunami wiping the libs from the surface of the planet, salting the seas with their tears as they were swept to their doom. It was, it seems, at least in results, a pretty ho-hum midterm election.
Yeah, there were hard-core factions within each party screaming about how this election could determine everything from abortion access to the Gravitational Constant in ways destined to destroy civilization on this and all possible worlds in the metaverse. Or something like that. I quit listening a while back.
It looks like we’re gonna get a modestly carmine-colored House, and a very closely split Senate, with a side-show rerun of the Georgia Run-Off Election Special. Maybe this one is the director’s cut? I dunno. If Georgians are having a hard time deciding between Warnock and Walker, maybe it’s because neither is quite the candidate most voters would like to see on the list? Again, I’m not sure, but I’m certainly not gonna get worked up about it.
And here’s why: They’re not even done counting votes for this election, and already lots of noise is erupting from the usual tainted spigots about…no, you don’t have to wait for it…2024.
There’s gonna be another one of these in a couple years. And I’m betting that many of the players will be the embarrassingly moronic, inept, and downright insane walking, talking bags of meat that we see and hear a lot from now.
If an alien spaceship were to land in my backyard right now, and throw #7 of the world’s biggest cliché top-ten at me: “Take us to your leader(s)”—I’d be at a loss at how to respond. Leaders? Well, let’s see, who owns Twitter now? Wait—no, not him. Or maybe I should point to Tim Cook? How about the celebrity hosts of The Voice or The Masked Singer? I’d be afraid that if we went to the Oval Office and sat down with Joe, about halfway through, there’d be a lot of uncomfortable throat-clearing (or whatever these aliens would do when they’ve realized that this just is NOT what they were looking for, and don’t we have anyone—or anything—better?) while POTUS regales them with a step-by-step description of his 17,000-mile march with Xi and his recollections of his glorious service in the Dewey administration. After that, we could go catch a flight and sit next to Ted Cruz at a Trump rally. Sheesh, what a mess.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the aliens pulled me aside, told me that this isn’t their first visit, and then said, “Geez, you stupid f—s on this planet. Look at you now.”
That’s when I’d ask if I could hitch a ride. And yeah, I know, take the cannoli.
World Party’s tambourine player made that band. 😁