In which there's a late arvo Killer time. to be had, with Killer and Ron DeSanctus ...

 

The pond deeply regrets that Killer was forced into a late arvo slot, but better late than never ... because the pond is intensely loyal to Killer and at one time yesterday, it was a featured splash ...

It's a resurrection story, a second coming ...

And it was a Killer story, with Killer still seeing hope for the meatball ... and the reptiles seizing the chance to fling in plenty of snaps ...

Meanwhile, the WSJ wasn't quite so convinced of the meatball's marketability, though there were still plenty of snaps, a thicket of Rons ...

Was the meatball tarnished goods? Would he have taken down the mango Mussolini? 

When it comes to ravaging, there's nothing like a sociopathic wannabe dictator to know how to throw a slimeball ... with the Daily Beast offering some tremendous fun ...

Oh there were lots and lots of nasties. 

The mango Mussolini knows how to nasty, nasty, and could even end up in a Zappa song singing "if she were my daughter" ... (and if you don't know the reference, perhaps that's best)

As they claimed credit for that one, the pond should provide the actual gross pudding credit ...

It reminded the pond of an old line revived by Crikey: As Helen Lewis in The Atlantic put it in July last year, “DeSantis’ problem is that his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong. He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes.”

Yes, it was all there in The Atlantic, (paywall), now feeling very long ago ...

And so on, the pond could go on quoting that yarn forever, but there's also pleasure to be found in a simple listing of endless, relentless, sociopathic abuse...

Meanwhile, good old Killer was still plugging away and looking forward to the resurrection, and it never occurred to him that Ron DeSanctus might now have to slink back to Florida and do battle with the house of mouse and dictionaries and such like ...

Empowered parents in schools? So that's what banning dictionaries was all about. Empowerment of endless stupidity to the nth degree ...

Meanwhile, the WSJ wasn't entirely convinced of the resurrection, that's if you could wade past the snaps to get to the winsome words  ...

He's "not a winsome political personality," but he has an excellent record banning dictionaries in Florida?

Perhaps there is hope, perhaps Killer was right to celebrate... perhaps he won't end up a little Marco or a Cancun Ted ... and the brave Killer kept working at it ... perhaps he is Churchillian ...

Oh dear, did Killer just reproduce that quote with a straight face ...shouldn't he have done a little reading?

Yep, it was the final touch, and Killer missed it ... as Killer is wont to do ...though it wasn't hard to find ...

Killer could even have entertained himself with Zoe Williams' How Winston Churchill became a mascot for anti-woke warriors ...

Or he might have read Charlie Sykes' summary, Exit DeSantis ...

Last week, the man from Florida declared “you could be the most worthless Republican in America,” but “if you kiss the ring, Trump will say you are wonderful.”

Seven. Days. Later. He kissed the ring ...

Or this ...

As my colleague Sonny Bunch noted last night, “Again, the theory of DeSantis’s candidacy just never made sense.”
“I’m not Trump, I’m more effective than Trump, but I’ll never criticize Trump because I’m terrified of his voters who don’t actually want effective Trump, they want vaguely racist, entertaining Trump. Vote for me?”
Who knew it would be such a spectacular, historic fail?

Before he fell like an all-day sucker for the Churchill line, he might have read Jack Shafer in Politico, not high on the pond's reading list, but brutal enough this time, Ron DeSantis Iced Himself Out of the Campaign:

By the time Ron DeSantis realized that the hand he dealt himself wouldn’t win him the presidential jackpot and that it was time to fold, he committed yet another media blunder with his withdrawal speech. Ordinarily when candidates throw in the towel, they do so on a stage flanked by family and bathed in the cheers of supporters urging them to stay the course. But not DeSantis.
Obviously craving his privacy in this public moment of defeat, he decorated a background with four American flags and shot the equivalent of a hostage video as he capitulated, speaking through a fake smile. Even on this day, the Ice Man of Campaign 2024 lacked the human warmth necessary to establish a live connection with real people who had believed in him.

And again...

DeSantis should have taken a page from Trump’s playbook. The former president is second to nobody when it comes to unleashing hellfire on the press — “the enemy of the people” in his words — but Trump also cultivates reporters behind the scenes and his aides know how to work the media.
Ultimately, the two biggest mistakes the DeSantis campaign made were 1) thinking Trump was washed up and that DeSantis could effortlessly inherit the crown by aping the former president’s positions and 2) that currying favor as the Fox News favorite would push him over the top. As recently as last spring, Fox was still “shadowbanning” Trump, according to Semafor, stiffing his reelection campaign because the Murdochs had had their fill of him. As a programming substitute, they had drafted DeSantis and Nikki Haley and even filled hours with Vivek Ramaswamy, giving him coverage disproportionate to the political neophyte’s popularity.
Perhaps DeSantis and Pushaw never investigated whether or not Fox could elect a president all on its own. As many times as Rupert Murdoch and Fox co-creator Roger Ailes tried, they never succeeded in putting their favorite candidate in the White House. In 2016, it backed Trump only after he had vanquished the rest of the field. As soon as Trump knocks Haley out, Fox will line up behind him once again, and DeSantis will join the dustheap of former hopefuls like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Ben Carson, all of whom had paid gigs on Fox as part of the channel’s habit of building presidential hopefuls’ profiles.

Or perhaps, dodging the Churchill bullet, Killer should have read Michael C. Bender and Nicholas Nehamas in the NY Times, The Emasculation of Ron DeSantis by the Bully Donald Trump, (paywall) a cute enough play on The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford ...

Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.
In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.
In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.
He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”
Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.

And again ...

After releasing a campaign video in 2022 that made him out to be a political fighter sent from the heavens, he appeared either unwilling or unable to swing back at Mr. Trump or go on the attack. Even Mr. Trump’s aides were surprised that the DeSantis campaign did not go harder at the former president on issues where he might be vulnerable with conservatives, like abortion.
And the prickly nature of Mr. DeSantis’s personality, which could manifest itself in an awkward mix of detachment, moodiness and facial tics, amounted to an irresistible target for Mr. Trump, who seemed to relish bullying Mr. DeSantis as if he were stuffing a freshman in a high school locker.

And again ...

Mr. Trump has long trampled over the boundaries of generally accepted political behavior, relentlessly pushing the racist “birther” lie about President Barack Obama and urging supporters to lock up Hillary Clinton. But his campaign hit new levels of cruelty against a fellow Republican.
The missives were often led by Mr. Trump’s chief spokesman, Steven Cheung, who leaned into his background as a public relations operative for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to deliver brutal slams with the force of the sport’s suffocating guillotine chokehold.
In November, Mr. Cheung told The Wall Street Journal that in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis would face “unimaginable pain that he’s never felt before in his life.”
In a news release, he cast doubt on Mr. DeSantis’s masculinity, saying that he walked like “a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time.”
Mr. Cheung also referred to the Florida governor as a “desperate eunuch,” questioned why Mr. DeSantis would “cuck himself” in front of the entire country — sexual slang that implies weakness in a man — and accused him of searching for “new sugar daddies” to fund his campaign. He called Mr. DeSantis a “disloyal dog.”
Mr. DeSantis fought back with a more traditional approach.
His campaign rolled out a “Trump Accident Tracker” in a daily email to the news media that highlighted Mr. Trump’s missteps on the trail. He criticized Mr. Trump’s “juvenile insults,” saying voters did not like them. (The eruption of laughter inside Trump rallies suggested otherwise.)
Mr. DeSantis eventually tried to up his game.
Responding to accusations that he wore lifts in his cowboy boots to appear taller, Mr. DeSantis questioned Mr. Trump’s manhood.
“If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate, I’ll wear a boot on my head,” Mr. DeSantis said.
The line did not seem to land. Mr. DeSantis himself has admitted that, unlike Mr. Trump, he is “not an entertainer.”

As for the future hoped and yearned for by Killer?

...aides said that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis had still not talked.
Asked about whether the two men could repair their relationship, Mr. Cheung held his fire.
“We’re focused on New Hampshire,” he said.

Meanwhile, the abuse kept being tracked at the Beast ...

... while Killer seemed to have run out of steam ...

Oh yes, he's now got a tremendous national profile, as mouse killer and dictionary banner and he's also ...

And that's why the pond will always go with Killer for a Killer time ... and by the way, masks. What better way to end than a mention of masks? 

Or perhaps Freud. 

Or perhaps Freudian masks ...

Thanks be unto Ron DeSanctus ... a big step forward in giving the United States, the real deal, the real Coke, not the fake one, a sociopathic dictator intent on destroying the world as revenge for perceived slights ... well done high-heeled white gumboot wearing Harvard 'leet Ron, well played Killer ...

And so to end on an optimistic note, thanks to Charlie

...Let’s leave aside the defeats, the impeachments, the corruption, the lies, the rape, the multiple felony indictments. For the moment let’s also pass over his calls for terminating parts of the Constitution, his claim of TOTAL immunity, his malevolence and bigotry, and the hundreds of thousands of people who died as a result of his demagoguery on COVID.

Instead, let’s just consider this last weekend:

• He confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, accusing Haley (who was not even in government at the time) of botching the defense of the Capitol when his supporters sacked it on January 6th.
• He fawned (once again) on murderous dictators, calling Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un “very fine people.” As our friend Jay Nordlinger remarked: “They are not very fine people. They are murderous dictators.”
• He praised Hungary’s illiberal strongman Viktor Orban as a role model. “A great man, a great leader in Europe. . . . Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong. It’s good to have a strong man at the head of a country.”
• He signaled again that he would surrender Ukraine to Russia.
• He threw Taiwan under the bus, suggesting that the United States should abandon it if is attacked by China.
• He mocked Nikki Haley’s birth name:
• Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as “Nimbra.” Haley, the former South Carolina governor, was born in Bamberg, South Carolina, as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has always gone by her middle name, “Nikki.” She took the surname “Haley” upon her marriage in 1996.
• He spread conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and continued attacking the woman he raped, E. Jean Carroll.
• He mocked Joe Biden’s stutter. (Nordlinger again: “Most parents, I wager, would not let their children engage in such behavior. Do they want it in a president? A leader? You can criticize Biden six ways to Sunday — but I don’t know why you have to include mockery of a stutter.”)

And, of course all this came just days after this:

Well you kissed the the ring Ron, feel free to collect your reward from the rump ...