Florida Sen. Rick Scott is making another play for attention, and we're going to give it to him mainly out of pity. The man's attempts to stay relevant, to find a constituency any wider than Florida's resident population of invasive pythons, are just so painful to watch that it's—oh, who are we kidding. It's deeply funny.
Scott's current stand-up routine is a warning to "socialists and communists" to stay away from Florida, and it's just so, so try-hard of him.
As Dave Weigel pointed out, all Scott's done here is create a video version of the fake "travel advisory" he put out almost exactly a month ago, one that warns "Florida is openly hostile toward Socialists, Communists, and those that enable them." That was an attempted retort aimed at far more serious warnings put out by the NAACP and by LGBTQ+ groups warning that Florida Republicans' demonization campaigns were turning the state into a more genuinely dangerous place to visit, what with Proud Boys threatening school boards and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mounting an overtly fascist presidential campaign premised on retribution against and elimination of Americans suspected of such "wokeness."
Rick Scott, however, has never had a political platform that didn't consist entirely of self-promotion, and he's been trying to make a big joke of the idea that his state is becoming a fascism-promoting hellhole. Rick Scott is also allegedly now considering running for president himself, which neatly explains why he's now trying to resurrect his little joke by making it a video. Next will be a dance number, and after that he'll try the same anti-"socialist" schtick while riding a unicycle and juggling custom-made MAGA bowling pins.
He probably picked a bad time for his little stand-up video since it comes again as violence-peddling white supremacist groups are once again waving Nazi flags on Florida street corners, but Rick Scott does not give a shit about Nazism in his state. Condemning Nazi flags on street corners will not get Scott 1 inch closer to the Republican presidential slot, but badly miming whatever Ron DeSantis has to say might.
The DeSantis plan for becoming president is to say a lot of very fascist things while hoping Donald Trump falls down a well between now and next January. The Rick Scott plan for becoming president is to position himself just behind DeSantis in case Ron falls down the same well himself.
And no, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that the Republican plan for being president consists of becoming as loathsome as possible while waiting for the people more loathsome than you are to self-destruct, but it is what it is.
What makes Scott's video and, let's face it, his whole new persona so Marco Rubio-pathetic is that Scott so clearly exists, as a potential contender, entirely within the vacuum of his own mind. There are plenty of crises and near-crises in Florida that Rick Scott could bend his attention to, if he could even pretend for a moment to give a damn.
While Scott is making sure that socialists stay well clear of Florida (it's not like the state relies on European tourism, after all), something that is not staying clear is: malaria. Yes, malaria. For the first time in two decades, Florida is now seeing local transmission of malaria, and now that Republicans have made a conspiracy crank anti-vaxxer the state surgeon general, God help everybody if that takes off as the next Florida epidemic.
Florida consumers have also just lost a third of a billion dollars in federal rebates for buying new energy-efficient appliances because DeSantis decided to simply withdraw from the program rather than let Floridians get the money.
And there is the fact that Florida is an actual shit show. The state has been grappling with a sewage crisis for years, with billions of gallons of sewage pouring into waterways.
Rick Scott, allegedly an actual United States senator if you can trust what you read in the papers, has a lot less to say about the malaria, the Nazis, and the Republican demand that state consumers get gouged good and hard and often than his does about making a pissy little videotape sneering at invisible "Communists."
It's just sad, that's what it is. The man knows he needs to drum up attention if he's going to return to being anything more than one of the three most hated people in the Senate, but the only way he can think to compete with DeSantis is to parrot DeSantis' own messages and ... what? DeSantis is already parroting Trump. What's step two, Rick? How does this translate, somehow, into you toppling either the Great Tangerine Seditionist or his hydraulically operated Mini-Me?
It's our job to cover politics and Rick Scott is definitely politics, but we don't have to pretend any of his little half-hearted stunts are anything but embarrassing. What is it about these once-ambitious senators, from Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz to Rand Paul to Rick Scott, that makes them so cringeworthy once they've passed their point of peak influence? How does the schtick that they rode so easily into their current positions wear so thin, so fast, the moment they get it into their heads that the nation wants to see them in the White House?
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