If his recklessness weren't so deadly to Floridians, cherubic-faced Gov. Ron DeSantis might seem amusing when he gets angry.
For instance, when he recently chastised journalists: "You can whiz on my leg but don't tell me it's raining."
More accurately, DeSantis pretends to be angry on camera. It helps him deliver mini Trump-like rants against the media — and last week, against political opponents trying to help Florida deal with a new complication of the COVID crisis.
Listening to DeSantis on any COVID-19-related subject is experiencing what the former president might have sounded like had he possessed a vocabulary: big, scientific-sounding words like "the winter respiratory cycle" thrown around, but, still, small thinking.
Throw the politics of coronavirus into the mix, and a DeSantis-Biden war looms over the highly contagious and lethal mutations of COVID-19 in Florida. On the table: what strategies should be adopted to stem outbreaks of the new variants.
So far, the governor's strategy seems to be to hop around the state announcing the distribution of vaccines to selected constituents like GOP party faithful Bay of Pigs veterans and red Florida customers of Publix, big donors to his reelection campaign.
Short on solutions, he has plenty to say about President Joe Biden.
DeSantis doesn't like science-driven Biden and his administration floating the idea of domestic travel restrictions for states like Florida that need protection from the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the United Kingdom.
Three coronavirus variants are circulating in the United States; the two others are from South Africa and Brazil.
BIDEN AND TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS
Fresh from mask-less partying in the middle of a pandemic at the Super Bowl in Tampa, DeSantis attacked Biden for giving a damn about the health of Floridians.
Any attempt to restrict travel to or from Florida "would be unconstitutional," said the governor, who installed useless checkpoints on I-95 at the Florida-Georgia border that caused huge traffic jams but didn't stop fleeing COVID-infected New Yorkers from entering the state.
"Any attempt to restrict or lock down Florida would be an attack on our state done particularly for political purposes," DeSantis said. "We will not back down. If anyone tries to target us, we will respond swiftly."
So says the 24/7 political governor, who, immediately after he said this, added the falsehood that while Biden wants to impose restrictions on Floridians, he's allowing immigrants to pour across the southern border unchecked.
"If you think about it, restricting the right of Americans to travel freely throughout our country, while illegal aliens pour across the southern border unmolested, would be a ridiculous, but very damaging farce," DeSantis said. "So we will oppose it 100%.
He added: "It would not be based in science. It would be a political attack against the people of Florida."
Those are the kinds of antics and fighting words that send his xenophobic voter base straight to his campaign's cash register.
The Biden administration has been holding COVID discussions, as any governing body should in times like these, and one of the participants told McClatchy about the travel-restriction idea.
Repeat: The talk of travel restrictions was a so-called trial balloon floated from the White House for feedback.
What the White House did do last week was appoint a diverse COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force that includes a South Florida representative, student advocate Vincent Toranzo. The national initiative will seek recommendations to ensure that the response to a pandemic that has disproportionately impacted minority communities "has equity at its core."
Needless to say, DeSantis, who is proposing harsh right-wing legislative initiatives to quash dissent, isn't a fan of concepts like social justice, either.
PARTISAN FIGHT OVER COVID
Rather than starting a partisan fight with the new administration whose policies, unlike the previous one, are rooted in science, DeSantis should be engaging Democrats to obtain a bigger share of the vaccine pie for Florida.
He should be telling Floridians that, now more than ever — with more than 200 confirmed cases of B.1.1.7 — we need to mask up.
He also should be modeling the behavior, but he's the state's proud anti-masker in chief.
"But how the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?" he complained to Politico when asked about going without a mask at the Super Bowl. "Come on. I had to watch the Bucs win."
As usual, the governor insults our intelligence and downplays the coronavirus, which has infected at least 1.8 million Floridians and killed 28,382.
Wearing a tightly fitted surgical mask — or layering a cloth one on top of the surgical mask — can increase by 96.5% the protection to the person wearing it and to others, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in guidance released last week.
But DeSantis' inaction derives from his blind devotion to one Floridian — the ex-president — and has consequences. COVID is on the rise in Florida, despite the pretty picture DeSantis paints and his indulgence in back-patting himself in press conferences.
He would rather play the role of antagonist to please Trump and shut down whatever Democrats propose — even life-saving measures — at our expense.
But what else can we expect from a governor who cares more about your right to party than addressing a more lethal COVID variant?
With DeSantis at the helm, we've always been on our own in Florida.
It fits his true nature to attack Biden for giving a damn about the health of Floridians.
