It’s woefully too late, especially for thousands of New Yorkers who died from COVID-19 after the state’s governor put sick people back in nursing homes, but the national media appears to be performing penance for its past failures.
They’ve suddenly realized that they can no longer hide the fact that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been a disaster.
Within the past week, for example, CNN editor Chis Cilizza, wrote a piece under the headline, “Andrew Cuomo’s Covid-19 performance may have been less stellar than it seemed.”
Ya think.
Meanwhile, The New York Times has gone rogue. It had stories discussing how nine top state public health officials under Cuomo quit in the middle of the pandemic after disagreements with him over how to distribute the vaccine and that Cuomo “severely undercounted” nursing home deaths.
The shift toward Cuomo has perhaps taken the media’s gunsights off their previous pandemic villain, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis – or DeathSantis, as his critics put it.
Yet if DeSantis has shown one thing throughout this crisis, it is a Trump-like quality to ignore the flak from the Fourth Estate and follow through on what he believes is right.
On Thursday, one conservative columnist praised that and suggested DeSantis needs to teach a class on this to other Styrofoam-spined Republicans.
Stephen Kruiser of the conservative website PJ Media noted the GOP’s scattershot approach to the Biden presidency.
“Too much time inside the Beltway infects even the best people with a severe case of the drama queens, so that’s to be expected. Even the ones you want to like eventually end up not being able to get out of their own way while trying to knock someone else over trying to get to a camera. Expect the worst, and the Beltway Republicans will never disappoint you,” he wrote.
Kruiser added, “Whenever the hopes for 2024 are discussed, the name of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida comes up a lot. There are a lot of Trump supporters who would like to see him return and run again. Among those people, DeSantis seems to be the favorite to run if Trump doesn’t decide to put himself through that again.”
“It’s easy to understand why DeSantis would be so popular with conservative Republicans who aren’t in the mood for the GOP to backslide and start capitulating to the Democrats all the time. He doesn’t do much of that.”
“OK, any of that.”
Continuing, Kruiser wrote, “Throughout this plague, DeSantis has heeded his own instincts rather than react to the shrieking of the Democrats and their hysterical flying monkeys in the media. That’s precisely what the Republican party needs — leaders who don’t fall for the false promise of respect from the mainstream media.”
He aptly pointed out that before Donald Trump won in 2016, “witless Republicans” would do as told by the media in exchange for being “treated slightly less awfully in the press.”
“As soon as their service was no longer required,” Kruiser added, “it was back to crap treatment as usual.”
Trump, however, “made everyone involved rip off their masks and expose themselves for the cancer that they are.”
“That the insidiousness of their ways is now a fully known commodity and there are still so many Republicans who want to play into their hands is rather disturbing to those of us who found Trump’s media battles such a refreshing change of pace,” said Kruiser.
“Decades of watching Republicans like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush gleefully submit to being whipping boys for the MSM had left us searching for reasons to stick with the party.”
Yet, he noted, “Trump changed all that. If the GOP wants most of those 74 million votes Trump got last year to stick around it better not fall in line behind squishes who are saying, ‘Thank you sir, may I have another?’ while being embarrassed by the likes of CNN.”
Kruiser then referenced DeSantis’s recent proposal to punish Big Tech for deplatforming political candidates.
“That might not be a complete fix, but it’s more concrete than anything the D.C. GOPers have attempted,” he added.
“Ignore the mainstream hacks, push back legally against the social media barons when possible. If only DeSantis could impress that attitude upon his fellow Republicans,” Kruiser concluded.
“Some are getting the vibe — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem comes to mind — but a lot more need to get with the program, or the GOP will be relegated to a double-masked Democrat mandate hell forever. Or until China occupies the United States.”