Things are going first-rate for President Joe Biden and Democrats, with rockets raining down on the airport in Kabul, where Americans are trying to escape, and a virus that continues to spread, killing thousands of people every week. So you know what that means.
It’s time for the media to once again pretend that it’s Ron DeSantis in Florida who’s really screwing things up.
Politico on Friday blared the headline, “Florida starts turning on DeSantis.” The story said that the governor “remains popular with conservatives across the country and in Florida, but his steadfast refusal to implement Covid-related restrictions amid hundreds of virus-related deaths in the state and rising infection numbers has the potential to threaten his electability.”
Yeah, okay, so at least we know this is about DeSantis being a threat to Democrats in 2024 and not about, you know, people dying.
To be sure, the coronavirus has been circling through Florida for the past two months, resulting in a surge of infections greater than it had seen at any point until then. More cases always mean more death. That has been the case nationwide, as different states have gone through their own waves of new infections at different times.
Much of the southeast and Texas happen to be going through such a wave now, just as many Democrat-led states, in all of their “follow the science” glory, did before.
The New York Times last week reported that “More people in Florida are catching the coronavirus, being hospitalized and dying of Covid-19 now than at any previous point in the pandemic, underscoring the perils of limiting public health measures as the Delta variant rips through the state.”
The phrase “public health measures” is a synonym for “business lockdowns and mask mandates.” DeSantis has been very resistant to both of those things, which causes a lot of butt-bruising among liberals who absolutely live for lockdowns and masks.
True, if we only look at things right now, Florida isn’t doing so hot. It has the third-highest death rate of all of the states when accounting for only the last seven days. But why should we ignore everything that happened before a week ago?
The pandemic didn’t begin in July, so let’s see how Florida stacks up against other states for the full range of the pandemic, even now as it swims in new infections.
Under DeSantis, Florida has the 19th highest death rate for COVID, with 205 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s six spots better than the media’s favorite girl boss Gretchen Whitmer, Democrat Gov. of Michigan, whose state has the 13th highest CVID-19 death rate at 215 deaths per 100,000. And it’s 16 spots better than former sex symbol and New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state has the third-highest death rate, 277 per 100,000. (Cuomo resigned last week and when his successor was sworn in she immediately acknowledged that the state needed to add 12,000 more COVID deaths to the toll that had previously been hidden by Cuomo.)
This is called “context,” a concept that the media have to ignore as they work overtime to undercut a likely run for president by DeSantis. A good example of that is how CNN and MSNBC have tried turning Alachua County, Florida, public school superintendent Carlee Simon into a folk hero.
Simon defied a statewide order by DeSantis banning mask requirements in public schools. A court has since declared DeSantis’ order against mandates illegal, but how has Simon’s mask bonanza worked out anyway?
The first day of school in her county was Aug. 10, a Tuesday. Students all masked up and ready to go!
In that week, 124 students tested positive for COVID. The next week, an additional 199. The week after that, an additional 181.
That’s more than 500 new infections since the start of school. Or as the media prefer to call it, “Hey, why won’t DeSantis just make everyone wear masks?!”
I think I’ve made my case, but I’d also like to note that Charles Blow of the New York Times devoted an entire column to DeSantis on Sunday under the headline, “Ron DeSantis, how many COVID deaths are enough?” In that piece of work, Blow wrote that “there have been multiple peaks in the G.O.P.’s utter disregard for public safety — even the safety of their own supporters,” and that, “It isn’t a single mountain but a range. The death dealing of Covid amounts to the Appalachians of ignorance.”
I include that not just as another example of the media’s brazen dishonesty in attempting to trash DeSantis but as a reminder of how bad of a writer Blow is.
