To be clear, I don't have any idea who the Republican nominee for president will be in 2024. My track record of predicting who the two parties will choose to be their standard bearers is what you might call, unimpressive. I was one who laughed at Trump's bizarrely staged June 2015 escalator entrance to the Republican primary. I also scoffed at the prospect Democrats would ever choose the gaffe-prone, cognitively questionable Joe Biden in 2020.
That's why I try, even when making observations about the state of our political culture, to avoid those kinds of prognostications. Still, even though I can't tell you who I think Republicans will choose to run against an 82-year-old Joe Biden, I am quite certain who the left thinks will fill that role.
In the last week, there has been a coordinated strike on Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis across the Democrat Party's propaganda outlets Americans casually refer to as the mainstream media. It tips their hand. They think it's going to be him and they are launching initial broadsides in a transparent attempt to cause Americans to associate his name with scandal, corruption, partisanship, and incompetence.
First came The Hill, fabricating a lie about DeSantis's efforts to prevent ideological indoctrination within the state's schools and universities.
From The Hill, a carbon copy story was run in Salon, pushed by the now-disgraced grifters at The Lincoln Project, and promoted by the Democrats' "religious" voices.
Even The Washington Post, where democracy goes to die in darkness, put this gigantic, fabricated, internet rumor on blast themselves:
It was the anatomy of a left-wing media hit job on full display.
Then the tragic collapse of the Miami Surfside condo building. While bodies, some potentially still fighting for life, remained trapped under the rubble, Vox's Aaron Rupar thought it was a good time to take a shot at DeSantis:
Notice that the attack doesn't even have to make sense. DeSantis, who had already declared a state of emergency, was on Hannity's program that evening to give updates on the building collapse and the rescue efforts underway.
But even Vox was outdone by Ken Klippenstein, who writes for The Intercept:
Does it even make sense to attack the man who was elected in 2019 for the building code regulations on a complex built in the 1980s, whose last inspection was done in 2018? Of course not. It's a crass attempt to exploit dead bodies in a transparent effort to weaken a political rival you see as formidable.
Even struggling comedian Samantha Bee unleashed on the Sunshine State's governor:
Just leave alone the disquieting reality that this passes as comedy on the left and note how it validates what several of us conservatives were saying for the four years of Trump's presidency. To be sure, there was legitimate opposition to the character and personal integrity of the former president. But there is also a binding truism on the left that cannot be ignored: the worst Republican in the world is whoever the next Republican frontrunner is.
Trump wasn't "beyond the pale" because he was evil in the left's eyes, he was "beyond the pale" because he was the Republican candidate. Remember, four years before Trump, the left accused Mitt Romney of murdering people. Four years before that, they said John McCain was "reckless," "dangerous," and a modern day "George Wallace." Four years before that, George W. Bush was a war criminal.
It was never difficult to predict that once 2024 arrived, if Trump wasn't the nominee, progressive media types would be pining away for the days of The Donald, claiming ridiculous things like, "At least with Trump you knew what you were getting." They will be lamenting the caustic state of our politics and without a hint of irony suggest that "at least during the Trump years, there was some civility."
For four years, America heard on a daily basis from our media culture that Donald J. Trump was the lovechild of Adolf Hitler and Satan. But now? Just ask Samantha Bee, Ron DeSantis is far worse than that.
I wonder why that might be.
