The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume CXI

It should be apparent by now that there are way more losers than winners. That is the natural order. Winners are outnumbered, sometimes by hundreds, if not millions. So it is amazing, and we should be in awe, when somebody wins, no matter what they win.

Maybe not so much when a game of checkers goes the right way for a kid who finally gets the hang of it. Everybody (I hope) eventually wins at least one game.

When a team pulls together for a championship title or when a single person defeats a multitude of talented contenders in the vocation of their own choosing for any given competition, it is worthwhile to step back for a moment and look at how they did that.

Races and physical sport require stamina, strength, and clever maneuvers. Tournaments may require outsmarting opponents by embracing the metagame. Entertainers rely on talent. Sometimes a lottery player gets lucky.

In any event, no matter the sport, you will generally find a cheerleading section. A contingent of supporters who decide that this is who they want to win. They will show up at games dressed and painted and sporting banners. They will vote online for their favorites and encourage others to do so, too. They will buy branded clothing and flash labels with pride.

But whatever the competition is, even with cheerleaders on their side, some players are just wasting everyone else’s time. They are out of their league, out of their element, out of their minds. Or they just want to cheat their way to victory. It is not this way in every game. Most games rely on strict rules and easy ways to keep score. Not so in politics, where the rules of engagement are lost between blurred lines.

Politicians must find a majority to win, but they may also be pandering to money. Seeking financial favor for influence. This is not new. But again, when it results in a win, we must be in awe. Step back and say, How did they do that? What did they promise? Who drank that Kool-Aid and how were so many of them duped?

It is clear that Donald Trump did not become president for the sake of the country. It was to win. To stand there and say “I won. Look at me. How do you like me now?” He did it with a sales pitch that fired up a bunch of cheerleaders who liked what they heard and they got out the vote.

For the most part, it was a big waste of time. Yes, there were 43 other contenders vying for the presidency in 2016 (17 Republicans, 5 Democrats, 22 Independents), and those contenders did indeed waste a lot of other people’s time and money. Because Trump won.

Blame the cheerleaders.

Once Trump was in office, he got to work. Everything that was viewed as an accomplishment could also be seen as a failure, and vice versa. It merely depends on who you ask. Which do you like better? Money or the environment? Would you rather have clean air, pure water, and land safe for wildlife, or just more money? You can’t have both.

Sprawl and contamination flourished on many fronts and this was hailed by investors and industrialists as a win. But at what cost?

His daily appearances played to the cheering section with promises of a better future with little for substantiation. This is because he told a lot of lies. Twenty a day on average.

Donye’s legacy will forever be debated. In the end, the result of his time in office appears, to me, to have been a waste. He is only a hero to those cheerleaders who joined him in filling the trash bin. Now another contender is on the scene to waste everyone’s time, money, and effort.

Meet Ron DeSantis.

Florida’s governor is well on his way to wasting a lot of everything in what is likely to be a failed attempt to become President. His campaign is a commercial for voters who want to make the USA more like Florida by doing the most unpopular things he can think of. He is targeting a fringe sector of society. Somehow, he thinks that there are enough of them to craft a country the way he sees fit. If he is right, and they start lining up for tasty orange tanged elixir, those constituents will represent a cross section of society who want their plastic cups filled with derision.

Long before DeSantis announced his candidacy, he had already begun a war against - well, just about everything that is fair and balanced, and I don’t mean old Fox News, I mean everything else. He called Florida “Where woke goes to die,” because he has a twisted concept of what woke truly means.

The big turning point for DeSantis began with his championing of the Parental Rights in Education bill. He signed it into law to restrict discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools, banning discussion of LGBTQ+ issues for all kindergarteners through third graders.

This came to be known as the Don’t Say Gay bill, raising the hackles of the LGBTQ+ community and all those who have no issue with truth in education. Then The Walt Disney Company spoke out against it. RonDo was having none of that. He attacked Disney where they have lived in central Florida for the past sixty years and threatened to rescind their special self governing status, which it seems that nobody but him cared about.

Disney always did okay with their own police force, fire department, building codes (which exceed state standards), infrastructure, and vending machines. But RonDo persisted and found himself upstaged by Florida’s largest private employer and wasting everyone’s time in ongoing court battles that he will not win.

After fighting the powerhouse of The Mouse, RonDo went all out kamikaze on everything he could think of that played to his fringe sector of supporters. He signed multiple bills into law that seemed to get more divisive with each pen stroke. He jumped on the six-week abortion ban bandwagon, signed the “Protect The Children” bill to shut down drag shows, criminalized doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors, eliminated funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from public universities, effectively prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory, banned transgender women and girls from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity, changed the death penalty from a unanimous decision to an 8 out of 12 vote by juries, and made sure that Floridians may now carry concealed weapons without a permit.

It is way more governance than most other states have, and most of this will probably be reversed as soon as he leaves office. But unlike other presidential hopefuls, RonDo won’t leave office when he loses his White House bid. Oh, no. He slipped another bill past the goalie that lets him keep his job when he fails to become president.

He built himself a life raft with Florida SB 7050 so that when the USS RonDo For President sinks, he doesn’t have to go down with the ship. Other presidential candidates have always had the conviction and good taste to resign from office win or lose, because they got into the game with confidence they would win. DeSantis lacks such confidence. So, he wastes not just Florida’s agenda docket, but the country’s.

He also wastes money. Besides signing things into laws that nobody needs or wants, he vetoes stuff, too. Whether or not he takes the time to learn about what he is signing is unknown. Florida lost millions in federal funding when he vetoed two block grants, first refusing to accept $24 million meant to upgrade rural wastewater motors and improve the efficiency of the pumping infrastructure in smaller counties across the state, then he skipped another $5 million meant to set up a planning and accountability infrastructure that would pave the way for federal cash aimed at improving energy efficiency across all 50 states. This money would have been given freely by the Fed and started a cascade effect by qualifying Florida for more federal funding, totaling $346 million, to support the programs. In all, Florida left $375 million on the table.

Why give up a federal cash boost? It has been suggested that DeSantis just did not want help from the Biden administration. He never was a fan of Joe’s.

RonDo is no fan of the environment either. Besides losing that third of a billion dollars I just told you about, DeSantis also prohibited local governments from making their own decisions on clean energy, is allowing exploratory drilling in environmentally sensitive wildlife areas, and has no problem with fracking or oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

He is all about wasting resources in favor of business. Luckily, there are enough cheerleaders, like Defenders of Wildlife, who got some of his dangerous legislative moves reversed. Instead of another highway, Florida still maintains a beautiful expanse of range for panthers and other native species.

DeSantis will say anything for that fringe vote. When it comes to our youth, he doesn’t just want to keep them from learning that gay people are okay, that their transgender friends are people too, and that it is possible to find acceptance when they identify as such. He also wants to sow the seeds of climate denial, and wants kids to think that slavery was beneficial to slaves.

RonDo faces a lot of criticism from tons of voters. You would think with all that negativity the pushback might get to him. That he might actually see, that preaching to the tiny choir he has, will not win the popular vote. He got busted using Florida state vehicles in Tennessee. He suggests he would hire anti-vaxxer and tale-spinner Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to run the FDA, who thinks that Covid was bio-engineered to be less lethal to Asians and Jews.

So, he is wasting everything. Every natural resource Florida has that he could use for the benefit of all, he ignores or tries to destroy. Every parent who wants their children to learn truth freely, he alienates. Every person who is not straight and white, he offends. All that money the federal government had to offer all fifty states, that he could have had a piece of for Floridians, that would have secured so much good for the land while creating jobs, he wasted.

It is a lot of time, money, and energy, gone to waste.

And his cheerleaders won’t even see it coming. Just like Trump’s cheerleaders, they will be blinded by the shine in that sweet orange cup of misdirection, and will stand in awe of the winner.

Of his campaign, Trump said today "We're way up in the polls." In a Reuters poll on August 3rd, the scoreboard read that Trump had a 47% approval rating among Republican voters while DeSantis had only 13%.

It is kind of scary when Donye is right.

Thanks for reading.

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