CT Blue

By all accounts, Ron DeSantis is committed to killing as many Floridians as necessary to advance his own political fortunes. The only conclusion one can draw from his behavior is that he firmly believes that those fortunes will be enhanced if he is a national leader in openly and devoutly doing all the wrong things in response to the pandemic. Which begs the question: Why does he think loud and proud incompetence amounting to murder is a sure road to political success? In his case, not merely to re-election, but to the presidency, if the former guy does not run.

Before exploring further, let me say up front: He may be right.

It is likely the case that a comfortable majority of voting age people residing in this country who, on paper, have the right to vote and want to vote, would be turned off by the candidacy of a man who is, in effect, a mass murderer. If we were a democracy, or even a representative democracy in which all of the people who fit that description were allowed to vote, he would have no chance of success. But we are not a representative democracy, we don’t allow all eligible people to vote, and our sacrosanct constitution gives outsize power in presidential elections to the state in which reprogrammable meatheads (see below) predominate, all of which significantly enhances the ability of a criminal such as DeSantis to gain and keep power.

In order to win an election, even a partially rigged one, people like him (looking at Ted, Greg, Josh and J.D, among others) must initially become the nominee of a major party. That means they must win the nomination of the Republican Party, for reasons so obvious we need not go into them. The Republican Party, particularly here in the North, still has enrolled members that are not completely Foxified zombies. But their numbers are dwindling, though their votes are still necessary for Republican victories in some places. In any event, the brain dead are now a solid majority of the Republican Party, and you can’t win a Republican primary without their support. So it’s easy to see why DeSantis has opted for the mass murder route if he has a Republican presidential nomination in mind.

It is worth pointing out here that mass murder would not be necessary had the former guy reacted to Covid in a politically astute fashion, by actually getting the Zombies to do stuff like wear masks, take vaccines, etc. Had he done that, those folks would be shooting maskless people on the streets and forcing vaccines on them instead of behaving as they were programmed to behave by the former guy and Fox. Had he so instructed the meatheads (again, see below) he would also, quite likely, have been reelected. But the mass murder route has now become dogma, so DeSantis, like all the rest, must go that route. (End of digression).

Other than in eccentric corners of New England, in order to get a Republican nomination for anything one must cater to a Republican majority that has been completely brainwashed. It was originally thought that this majority could be brainwashed with no ill effect; it would simply go to the polls and vote as instructed, and step aside when the party proceeded to serve the needs of the rich. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. As Driftglass patiently explains:

…the GOP was not a collection of fiscally conservative, Burke-quoting pragmatists with a few, harmless, bug-eyed goofs straggling off in the fringes that professional ratfuckers like Rick Wilson were hired to round up every couple of years to add a few extra votes to the Party of Lincoln’s tally.

None of this was true because the Party of Lincoln had been dead for decades and the spawn of Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Gingrich and all the rest had spent those decades incubating something monstrous inside its husk, while the genial, aw-shucks David Brooks Conservatives you saw on your teevee were tasked with distracting the public from the shitpile of bigots and imbeciles their party had become. With using their outsized media megaphones to perfume the rot and pooh-pooh any suggestion that Republican Party was racing towards out-and-proud fascism as the crackpot alarmism of a few, disgruntled Libtards.

And then along came a loutish Day-Glo Orange bigot who lumbered into the GOP’s crooked game and took it over by doing literally nothing more than running the GOP’s own racist playbook louder and more crudely than everyone else. He found a party of reprogrammable meatheads who had been primed for decades to respond with adoration to anyone who would finally come along and tell them that it was OK to say the quiet, racist, crazy part out loud. In the GOP Trump found a place outside of reality teevee and the New York real estate sewer where all of this grotesque character flaws were suddenly virtues.

In this way, Trump was a strange kind of blessing. He was (caution: Dune reference ahead) the Right’s fascist Kwisatz Haderach, but arrived too soon which screwed up everyone’s long-range scheming. He was the unplanned foreshock of the quake to come: his impact was strong enough to shatter the GOP’s thin and aggressively maintained veneer of respectability and expose the horrors that had been long metastasizing beneath the mask, but he was too wrapped up in his own corruption and petty grievances and too shackled by his own incompetence to complete the Republican project of ending our democracy once and for all.

The days when a Romney, or even a Bush, could be imposed on the “reprogrammable meatheads” are now past. The Republican Party has created a monster, and that monster is now in control. So, if DeSantis wants to be president, he must cater to that monster, which controls the party whose nomination he seeks.

But what then? How does he propose surmounting the obstacles that being a mass murderer places in his path, the primary obstacle being the fact that the reprogrammable meatheads are still a minority in a sufficient number of states to make an electoral college victory difficult if not impossible.

The answer is all too apparent. Suppress the votes in those states with a majority of Democratic voters suffering under the thumb of gerrymandered Republican majority legislatures or, when necessary, have those legislatures steal the electoral votes. There is, in short, a better than even chance that the Republicans will do in 2024 what they have accused the Democrats of doing in 2020: rig and/or steal an election. This is entirely consistent with their history of accusing others of the crimes they are themselves committing. It is also all too apparent that the Supreme Court is ready to give that steal its imprimatur, and that while the court would prefer that the steal be done in such a way as to preserve a veneer of legality, however transparent that veneer may be, it will no doubt swallow hard and uphold anything they do. We will also be treated to the spectacle of the media both siding the situation, comparing the Republicans lying bleats about a stolen election to Democratic complaints of a provable theft.

So, in sum, it is at least plausible that mass murder is an effective strategy to capture the White House.