05-01-2022, 08:04 PM
(05-01-2022, 05:02 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(05-01-2022, 03:52 PM)David Horn Wrote:(04-30-2022, 03:06 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: In many people's minds Ron DeSantis is so scary that he has been given the nickname DeSatan.
That's good! DeSantis, unlike his "mentor", has the wherewithal to actually do serious harm. Here's the question: is that his intent? I tend to see him as an autocrat in performance clothing. Is that a benefit to him personally or not? It's hard to see it helping him do anything but play his base like a fiddle or fail miserably trying to do something substantive.
Are you hinting at possibly what some would call a paper tiger, whose bark is much worse than his bite might be?
Paper tiger whose bark is worse than his bite? That leads to the sort of warning that one sees in high-school English classes about the mixed metaphor. OK, dogs are close relatives of tigers and have a few things in common... power, speed, agility, strength, cunning, voracity, sharp claws and teeth... and at their worst, dogs really are similar to bears and Big Cats. The bark can be disconcerting and disorienting.
Last October some burglar broke into a house infested with a pair of pit-bulls at night, which is almost as dangerous as entering a carnivore enclosure at a zoo. The 22-year-old burglar did get out of the house, only to die of wounds. I nominated that act of extreme stupidity for a Darwin Award. I'm guessing that the
Maybe that's not so much a mixed metaphor as it looks. Dogs are not paper tigers.
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That said, I understand that Ron DeSantis has tried to cover up the death toll from COVID-19 in his state, which is disgraceful and dangerous. Remember that although he has a voter base he can't win with that alone. He gets reliable support from corporate interests that he well serves.
We have seen four years of the most autocratic (I use the word despotic) President in American history.
Democrats may be learning how to play hard with Republicans at the last moment in which they can get away with it. Disgraceful behavior should ruin political careers no later than the next election. I can think of some Republican pols who have bungled the response to COVID-19 or shown undue deference to you-know-who after the Capitol Putsch.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.