Author Michael Wolff is known for his gossipy, lightly sourced books that dish insider dirt. The stories he relates are titillating but not to be taken at face value since they lack convincing evidence. But they do serve as a measure of the zeitgeist within the political establishment and his latest book has an indicator of how low Florida governor Ron DeSantis has sunk because he provides an anecdote that, while having dinner at the Tucker Carlson home, DeSantis apparently irritated Carlson’s wife by dominating the conversation and may have actually kicked one of the family dogs.
The DeSantis couple allegedly failed “to read the room,” especially with Carlson’s wife, “a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house,” Wolff notes. “For two hours Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversation ritual or propriety, reeling off an unselfconscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments.”
Making matters worse, Wolff claims, an “impersonal” DeSantis seemed dismissive and may have used physical force against one of the Carlson family’s four beloved spaniel pups.
During the dinner, Wolff writes, “DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: she did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a ‘fascist.’ The pot calling the kettle even blacker. Forget Ron DeSantis.”
Is the story true? Who knows? But kicking people’s pet dogs and cats is something that is beyond the pale for anyone. This is the behavior of cartoon villains and even an allegation of doing so is damaging. Even some of the cult followers of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), although ever-willing to overlook his groping and other assaults of women, may find it hard to forgive their idol for doing so, unless they could be persuaded that the pet was the Devil incarnate or Joe Biden in disguise.
Adding to DeSantis’s woes, a new poll finds the one-time SSAT-slayer slipping to fifth place in New Hampshire polling.
Maybe we should bring out a DeSantis lettuce to see which lasts longer.
What truly amazes me about this story is that apparently both of these guys found a woman willing to marry them. And not just a woman, but one each.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog
John @2: You seem to like that website. From what I’ve seen, it merely states the fucking obvious. Perhaps it’s aimed at those who have never watched TV?
Don’t you occasionally chide people for posting stuff that most people know, or could easily look up?
Rob, it shows that it’s a hoary and established trope.
And it suggests that it’s just a story.
I was gonna quote (then didn’t) this first:
“You seem to like that website.”
It’s a good reference, much as is Wikipedia, which I cite even more often.
Yes, I do like it.
(Also, it’s so very easy to click into one of the links and get lost in its extensive labyrinth of references)
“From what I’ve seen, it merely states the fucking obvious.”
(hyperlinks elided)
“Don’t you occasionally chide people for posting stuff that most people know, or could easily look up?”
Do I? Not really, though I know what you intend to express; and even then not unless it’s something utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand, or prominently featured in the MSM news feeds at the time of posting.
That noted, I doubt most people know about the trope and how it’s used to establish character.
If the article had said DeSantis had ‘pushed with his foot or maybe kicked’ a person, I’d have passed it by without interest. If it had said he had maybe possibly kicked a child, I’d have thought ‘what a wanker’. But maybe possibly kicking a dog…?
The man is Hitler himself.
___
Rob, John’s nitpicks do not apply to John. The chief nitpicker is immune to nitpicking you see. Or it seems that way; he sure flies into a tizzy if you do so.
Such purported expertise about me!
(First one of your quota, Holms)
Lets just remind ourselves that this man is the Republican party’s current best hope for defeating Trump.
Whenever Mano posts about dogs, I think of Baxter (the Wonder Dog) -- beloved of long time readers, gone but not forgotten.
https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/files/2019/07/Baxter101.jpg
The lettuce won against our last prime minister.
Our current one has just decided that a climate-change shoulder shrug would be his winning strategy for the next election which will be sometime in 2024. I’ve got some carrots which want to race him to March or April.
(PS for those unfamiliar with UK General Elections, it’s a maximum 5-yr term, but the PM can ask the monarch to call it sooner. We tried fixed terms recently but the winners decided they needed to lever more political advantage out of the date.)
Oh, come on, you buried the best bit of that. You need to append the line “by calling a snap election to increase their majority going into Brexit negotiations… a majority they lost entirely in that election forcing them into a hostile coalition, despite being up against the worst opposition leader for a generation”.
That was the first time I said “this is the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime”… but fuck me it was NOT the last.