Opinion
By Jeff Childers
01-22-2024
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! The new year has well and truly started and continues to deliver its surprises. In today’s roundup: my take on Governor DeSantis’s sudden and unexpected exit from the presidential race this weekend; Senator Fetterman’s treatment seems to be working better than expected; SADS Royal Cluster expands with unlikely and atypical Royal Family cancer; SADS actress dies from decade-old surgical complication, allegedly; Biden campaign makes odd error and is now scrambling to avoid a New Hampshire loss; and large local Fox affiliate runs remarkable segment on jab DNA contamination.
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🔥 And just like that, it was over. Yesterday, after an ominous day of silence from the campaign, decorated military veteran, Harvard-trained lawyer, former Freedom Caucus member, and world-renowned Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 45, published a video gracefully withdrawing from the ultra-high-stakes 2024 Presidential race.
Governor DeSantis bore no grudges. In his exit video, the Nation’s best governor endorsed President Trump and warned against Nikki Haley.
CLIP: Ron DeSantis’ graceful withdrawal message (4:33).
The news broke the hearts of many DeSantis supporters. To them, the Governor offered the country a unique opportunity, now lost, and which may never come around again. One can imagine that in Heaven’s lofty heights, when the Divine Creator scraped Anthony Fauci into existence and horrified by what He’d made, He quickly created Ron DeSantis to balance the scales.
As the first major political figure to courageously push back on federal pandemic policy, Ron DeSantis may have single-handedly snatched the country from the jaws of totalitarian dystopia and transformed Florida’s international image from being the doghouse where “Florida Man” lives into the “Free State of Florida,” making ours the most prosperous, most conservative big state in the Nation.
Supporters of Governor DeSantis’s presidential aspirations prayed the governor would rescue America in the same way he rescued the Sunshine State. If this were anything like a normal presidential cycle, Ron DeSantis would probably have won in a landslide. Alas, we are cursed to live in interesting times, and it’s nothing like a normal presidential cycle.
DeSantis failed to grip not for any legitimate failure but because of qualities his supporters love the most about the Governor: that he isn’t a polished political type; that he isn’t “made for television;” that he isn’t a fake, crafted personality. The New Statesman’s headline this morning essentially admitted DeSantis is too unpolished and just too smart to be President:
DeSantis’s intellectualism shouldn’t have been a handicap. It was often an obvious asset. For instance, it was delightful watching the Governor mop the stage with oleaginous Gavin Newsom in their odd “debate.” But — in hindsight — Trump’s political decision to not debate anyone was politically superior to DeSantis’s jarring decision to debate California’s oily, over-coiffed governor, who was not running for anything.
Also in hindsight, in this race DeSantis could have used more high-stakes political experience. According to the LA Times, as of January 8th, DeSantis had been stomped on by over $44 million in negative attack ads — more than twice as much as either Trump or Biden faced. And that was just the political ads. Corporate media — gleeful at getting whack at the anti-lockdown governor — savaged DeSantis, selling schoolyard slanders as straight news, like their silly theory that DeSantis wore lifted boots. E.g., from Politico, in November:
In another face-palmingly-awful example of modern “journalism,” corporate media wrote a series of stupid stories breathlessly repeating a rumor that one time, while on a private flight, DeSantis ate a chocolate pudding cup using his fingers.
But most of all, corporate media and the Democrats’ army of Twitter trolls relentessly ravaged the Governor about his unpolished body language and for not having well-practiced facial expressions.
Mano a mano, DeSantis is second to none in manhandling obnoxious reporters; it’s one of his favorite pastimes. But this tsunami of picky personal attacks was something new; a simultaneous, coordinated, below-the-belt sneak attack by thousands of faceless journalists with whom DeSantis could not spar in any kind of fair fight.
But President Trump — long the media’s hated “Orange Man” — swims and thrives in the corporate media’s ocean of personal destruction.
DeSantis could never crack the code of matching the compelling moral and spiritual argument for Trump’s re-election. It might not even have been possible. In DeSantis’s withdrawal video, the Governor expressly acknowledged that most Republicans still want justice for the 2020 elections — and for the democrats’ hypocritical, two-tiered legal system — and that justice only seems achievable through Trump’s re-election:
“A majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance, and they see Democrats using lawfare to this day to attack him.”
At times, the gulf between conservatives supporting Ron DeSantis and those supporting Donald Trump became regretfully rancorous and unnecessarily bitter, a fiery disagreement gleefully enflamed by opportunistic democrats. I have always been specially fond of the Governor, with whom I served in the bloody trenches of the early pandemic, when even asking whether masks worked or not was literally killing grandma.
Coffee & Covid has always withheld criticism of either candidate and hewed to our core philosophy that there is no one perfect political “Superman” who can magically fix everything, however much we yearn for a savior. Politics is not where saviors are found.
But there is an undeniable spirit or zeitgeist afoot in the Nation, an unquenchable spirit that seems to demand a rematch between Trump and Biden, a spirit referenced in the LA Times’s op-ed about DeSantis’s withdrawal:
As it turns out, a referendum on Trump’s mistreatment (as his voters see it) and subsequent legal problems is exactly the race most Republicans appear to want this November. Nothing will feel better to them than watching Trump beat Biden fair and square, a moment of euphoric vindication.
DeSantis’s experience running for President makes him a stronger politician. He is young, and has a bright political future ahead of him. Who knows what comes next? Now it is up to President Trump to heal the divide inside the party, and to show he can unite disaffected groups of Republicans. Showing class and great statesmanship, DeSantis started the healing by endorsing the former President.
DeSantis also made a difficult political decision by getting out early, which had to be hard — it’s still so early — but was ultimately wise, because it avoided deepening intra-party divisions for no benefit. In a sense, DeSantis sacrificed his own political ambitions for the good of the country. President Trump needs to show DeSantis voters the sacrifice was worth it.
🔥 You tell me, but it sure seems like the conservative counter-revolution is reaching some pretty unexpected places. In Exhibit A, behold this clip from Jake Tapper’s interview with John Fetterman on CNN this weekend, about the Senator’s politically-incongruous comments supporting Israel and advocating for a secure U.S. border, which both badly triggered Twitter “progressives”:
CLIP: Fetterman interviewed about Israel and the U.S. border (2:15).
About the border, Fetterman said:
“I honestly don’t understand why it’s controversial to say we need a secure border.
The thing about immigration is we wanna provide the American dream. It seems very difficult when you have 300,000 people showing up [in one month] at our border to do that. Two things can be true at the same time. You can support immigration. But we also need a secure border.”
Fetterman’s speaking also seems to be improving — along with his thinking. Maybe we should send more democrat politicians to that same hospital where Fetterman went for his depression treatment. I’d like to shake that psychologist’s hand.
💉 The Royal Cluster expanded yesterday. The UK Independent reported it in a stately story suggestively headlined, “Sarah Ferguson diagnosed with skin cancer just months after breast cancer treatment.” Two different cancers in six months. Happens all the time.
Sarah Ferguson, 64 is the UK’s Duchess of York. One of her spokesmen told reporters that, “Following her diagnosis with an early form of breast cancer this summer, Sarah, Duchess of York has now been diagnosed with malignant melanoma.” My goodness.
Talk about bad luck. Especially for people who enjoy the very best doctors, diet, and medical care in the entire world. Since I’m a lawyer, not a mathematician, I asked Bard A.I. to compute the odds of getting blue-blooded breast cancer and malignant monarchic melanoma in the same six-month period. The A.I. calculated some pretty long odds:
“Based on individual risks and incidence rates, the odds of developing both breast cancer and skin cancer in the same six-month period would be extremely low, likely in the range of one in millions or even billions.”
Seems pretty atypical. And Sarah’s bit of bad luck was combined with King Charles’s misfortune, as right now the Royal Person is habituating in the hospital getting prepped for enlarged prostate surgery. And on top of those mishaps is the poor Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, who is also nesting in the hospital, recovering from her mysterious “abdominal surgery.”
How do you like those odds? Three related Royals with three weird atypical medical conditions all at the same time. I didn’t even bother asking Bard to run the numbers, it would probably self-destruct.
Oh — one more thing. The double-cancer-struck Duchess was enthusiastically jabbed; a celebrity jab advocate:
Hmm. You don’t suppose the Royal family could have all been vaccinated from the same mRNA vial, do you? I’m just asking. Don’t cancel me.
We pray for the entire Royal Family’s rapid, regal recovery.
💉 More bad luck. People Magazine reported the cause of death of last year’s sudden and unexpected expiration of beautiful model and South African actress Charlbi Dean, 32, in an article headlined, “Charlbi Dean’s Cause of Death Confirmed by Coroner After Her Sudden Death at 32.”
According to the recently-released coroner’s report, Charlbi’s sudden and unexpected death from sepsis last August was a complication from surgery she had ten years before. If you believe that. Officials based that conclusion on the fact that Charlbi had her spleen out after a bad car accident in 2013, and then she got bacterial sepsis in 2023 and died.
Even more bad luck, her “surgical complication” took a decade to show up, but then it went unbelievably fast:
Days after she died, Dean’s brother Alex Jacobs told Rolling Stone that her sudden death in New York City on Monday happened after she began experiencing “minor” symptoms and soon asked her fiancé, Luke Volker, to take her to an emergency room. She died just hours later.
“This happened literally within the span of a day: getting a headache, going to sleep, waking up her boyfriend and saying please take me to the hospital,” (Charlbi’s brother Alex) Jacobs told Rolling Stone.
Blaming Charlbi’s sudden death on her missing spleen is rubbish; a total cop-out. The truth is they have no idea why the poor girl died of a septic bacterial infection, inside of a few hours from start to finish, and they are too chicken to speculate about what could actually have caused that. Cowards.
🔥 The Hill ran an oddly metaphorical story yesterday headlined, “Biden seeks unlikely write-in victory in New Hampshire.” The trouble started when, somehow, Joe Biden forgot to file the paperwork to appear on the New Hampshire democrat primary ballot.
New Hampshire democrats have plenty of possible choices. Over a dozen less well-known candidates will appear on the Democratic ballot, like primary challengers Marianne Williamson and Representative Dean Phillips (D-Minn.).
According to the Hill, Democrats are giving two conflicting excuses for Biden’s absence from the list.
First, there is a complicated story about the DNC’s effort to reschedule New Hampshire’s primary to after South Carolina; a proposal Republicans did not agree with. So Team Biden is now saying they intentionally omitted balloting Joe, in solidarity with the DNC and to teach the Republicans a lesson they won’t soon forget. Or something like that.
They say Biden’s absence doesn’t matter and nobody cares.
But behind the scenes, Democrats are also scrambling to coordinate a desperate write-in effort to make sure Biden does not lose New Hampshire. Write-in campaigners attended over 60 Democratic committee meetings and state party events over the past several months, speaking about why it was important to write-in Biden’s name on January 23rd and how to do it.
The write-in campaign has also blanketed social and traditional media for months, getting the word out to democrat voters in the state. Aaron Jacobs, a former staffer for Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), said volunteers will be at polling places on Tuesday with “Write-in Biden” signs and QR codes giving detailed instructions on how to properly write Biden in.
The Biden Campaign disavowed any connection to the write-in effort, since their official position is they don’t care whether or not Joe wins New Hampshire. If you believe that. Polls suggest the write-in campaign will get Joe over the hump, but it sure doesn’t look too good.
Late last week, Democrat presidential candidate Dean Phillips put out a hilarious website and published this celebrity interview about Biden’s write-in ballot initiative in New Hampshire. Enjoy:
CLIP: Team Dean on Joe Biden’s New Hampshire campaign (1:00).
💉 Incredibly, Fox-35 Local (Orlando) ran a straight news story this weekend about the DNA contamination in the jabs. The segment discussed Dr. Ladapo’s publicly-stated concerns, his demand letter to the CDC, and the resulting conflict between Florida’s Surgeon General and the FDA. They ended the segment interviewing a pro-jab doctor who weakly pushed the shots, but before reassuring the audience, he named several other medicines that showed horrible side-effects in the long term.
Watch for yourself and let me know what you think:
CLIP: Fox-35 Orlando reports on DNA contamination in the Pfizer shots (2:00).
Seems like progress. If we can just get back to the point where reporters fairly describe both side of an issue, that would be huge.
Have a magnificent Monday! Remember — life and the Presidential campaign both continue, as does Coffee & Covid, so meet us all back here tomorrow for another installment.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
