Florida Man Pretends State Is On The Border

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to talk about anything else other than his plummeting approval ratings and rising delta variant COVID cases, the worst in the nation by far, by pretending the real issue is President Biden's "failure" on "illegal" immigrants in Texas, or something. Steve Benen:

So, a few things.

Right off the bat, it's worth emphasizing that Biden didn't single out Florida; Florida singled out Florida with its intensifying crisis. As NBC News reported, "The state has become the new national epicenter for the virus, accounting for around a fifth of all new cases in the U.S."

In fact, roughly a year and a half into the pandemic, conditions in Florida are effectively as bad now as they've ever been, which is bound to get noticed, whether the governor of the Sunshine State likes it or not.

But more broadly, what we saw from DeSantis was a clumsy effort, not to defend his record, and not to help protect his own constituents, but to dramatically change the subject. The COVID crisis isn't the story the Republican wants to talk about, so the governor, embracing "whataboutism" to an absurd degree, tried to shift the focus to a story he likes better.

Forget the pandemic; forget Florida's maxed out hospitals; forget rapidly rising infection tallies; forget lagging vaccination rates. Ron DeSantis would prefer to talk about immigrants and the U.S./Mexico border.

In fact, the ambitious GOP governor's political operation even sent a fundraising letter to his supporters yesterday, suggesting "migrants" are responsible for climbing COVID numbers.

At this point, we could explain that the border is not, in reality, the problem. We could also explain that Florida is one of the hemisphere's largest peninsulas -- it's largely surrounded by water -- and it shares a border with Georgia and Alabama, not Mexico.

But there's ultimately no real point in even taking DeSantis' rhetoric seriously as a substantive argument, because it's not. The governor doesn't have a plan to deal with his state's intensifying public-health crisis; he opposes policies that might help for purely political reasons; and he's on the defensive after the president helped expose his indifference.

And let's not pretend DeSantis cares about his constituents, either. He's facing 100,000 new cases per week in his state alone and he won't lift a finger to stop it, but he'll yell at Biden all day, and send out STOP THE FAUCISTS emails to fundraise.

He honestly doesn't care if people die, he can blame Biden.

That's what makes him the non-Trump frontrunner in 2024 in the Death Cult party.