By Phlip
Klein
Monday, October
03, 2022
Charlie
earlier pointed out how off-base it was for a Twitter user to portray Governor
Ron DeSantis seeking federal hurricane-relief aid as “bending the knee” to
President Biden. But Politico has woven this basic idea into a
ridiculous story with a ridiculous premise:
The
“president’s wallet”? What on earth are they talking about? The president may
carry around a wallet for ice-cream purchases that provide fodder to a media
that refuses to cover him critically, but taxpayer money that has been
allocated to pay for federal disaster relief is not his personal piggybank. As
Charlie put it, suggesting otherwise “is grotesque and fascistic.”
Beyond
the offensive idea that taxpayer money is synonymous with the “president’s
wallet,” the piece dings DeSantis for hypocrisy for having opposed federal aid
for Hurricane Sandy. Put aside the fact that there were good reasons to object
to Sandy relief: It cost $50 billion, included money for future mitigation
efforts that did not address the immediate emergency, blew past the caps set by
the hard-fought debt-ceiling deal, and was not offset with cuts to the budget
elsewhere. But it’s also worth understanding that if DeSantis had gone the
other way, and decided not to seek federal funds, he’d be slammed even harder
by the same people now calling him out for requesting money. And we don’t even
have to make this a hypothetical.
During the Obama presidency, when Republican governors declined to accept stimulus money or use Obamacare to expand Medicaid, they were lambasted as cruel throughout the media, accused of putting politics before people, and even accused of effectively killing people. Everybody knows that were DeSantis to refuse aid on principled grounds, we’d see the same sort of coverage.
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