DeSantis: Excuse Me While I Flip-Flop, Pander And Obfuscate
Is it introspection and evolution or is it flip-flop and pandering, only the candidate knows for sure.
The first cited flip-flopper was President Grover Cleveland. It started in 1888 when a New York Tribune writer called out the president for his “Fisheries flip-flop.” The writer apparently was referring to Cleveland’s handling or mishandling of the fishery treaty that governed waters shared by American and Canadian vessels. Flip-flop was coined as apparent wordplay on the way fish flop and flip on a boat deck.
There are many kinds of flip-flopping. To understand the flip-flop, it is necessary to realize that most anything the politician says is either “mumbo jumbo,” “wishy-washy” or “higgledy-piggledy.”
Mumbo jumbo is defined as “complicated activity or language usually intended to obscure and confuse” with “unnecessarily involved and incomprehensible language or gibberish.” Wishy-washy is defined by Merriam/Webster as “lacking in character or determination: ineffectual” and higgledy-piggledy is an adverb that offers information “in a confused, disordered, or random manner.”
There is the “I didn’t do that” flip-flopping that trump has finely honed as a dark art. The “time is no longer right” flip-flop of Hillary Clinton when she said she changed her mind and that she no longer believed that marriage is a holy contract between a man and a woman or trump’s bloviating about his opposition to abortion though he once bragged about being pro-choice.
In the age of trump, the political flip flop is no longer a game changer; if anything, it is a sign of the politician’s willingness to please or appease his constituents, at any price. No official has ever come even close to trump, the quintessential flip-flopper, the non-pareil of all non-pareils. Everybody, even trump, knows that trump is a liar so any flip flopping is irrelevant, a non-sequitur.
The problem with a serial, obsessive flip-flopper is that nobody believes anything the flip-flopper says. That goes in spades for trump, who changes reality more times than Lady Gaga changes her socks. There is no need to go through the litany of trump’s flip-flops; suffice to say they are all deceit.
The quintessential trump moment came during the February 2016 debate ahead of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Trump had supported the invasion of Iraq but no more. At the debate, he called the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” and criticized the Bush administration for lying about Saddam Hussein’s having weapons of mass destruction.
Trump reminds me of the cartoon of the leader who stands proudly behind his minions, telling them that he’ll lead them wherever they want to go.
Of course, flip-flopping can reach such a level that even a politician cannot squirm out of it, as when Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., (for the moment) set the record straight on Feb. 20 when he told Piers Morgan, “I never claimed to be Jewish” just “Jew-ish.”
In today’s climate, Florida’s Republican governor and likely presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, has little to fear about being called to the carpet for supporting the U.S. support of Ukraine last year and now, after finding God, deciding that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a regional matter, a “territorial dispute” not worthy of U.S. involvement.
Here is what DeSantis said on March 13 in a questionnaire issued by Tucker Carlson to potential presidential candidates. In a purely coincidental moment of utter candor, Desantis struck the same note as trump in pandering to the far right base.
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis wrote.
Turn the political clock back seven years and DeSantis said this.
“We in the Congress have been urging (then-President Obama) — I’ve been — to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight their good fight. They’re not asking us to fight it for them. And the president has steadfastly refused. And I think that that’s a mistake,” said DeSantis, then a member of Congress.
DeSantis reiterated his support as recently as at a March 2022 news conference, when he said, “When I was in Congress under President Trump, we funded a lot of weapons for Ukraine to be able to defend themselves.”
So who do you believe? The double talking DeSantis of 2022 or the one of earlier this month?
The politicos who signed on to trump’s election lies have been especially active in flip-flopping. One shining example is Donald Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general who was the GOP nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in New Hampshire, losing in the general election to incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan.
For more than a year, Bolduc loudly and repeatedly endorsed the false “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theory that widespread fraud led to the election of Joe Biden. Two days after winning the 2022 primary, Bolduc put his wet finger up, sensed the direction of the wind and changed his horse in midstream and acknowledged that Biden was the legitimate president and that the election was not stolen. Bolduc did hedge a bit as he continued to promote the false claim that the election was marred by fraud. Then, a month later, he flipped again, saying “I can’t say that it (2020 presidential election) was stolen or not. I don’t have enough information.”
Among the famous, historical flip-flops, the one told by President George H.W. Bush stood out and largely caused him to lose his reelection bid. At the 1988 Republican National Convention, Bush called for all Americans to read his lips about “No New Taxes.” It was a good soundbite until two years later, when Bush raised taxes as part of a budget compromise with Congressional Democrats.
Bush tried all sorts of contortions to explain why his lip-reading was no longer relevant but in the end, he lost to Bill Clinton. If that was today, and trump had said, “read my lips” and then did a 360, he would simply blame fake news and claim that he never changed his mind and move on without losing a step.
The war in Iraq brought about a slurry of flip-flops.
President George W. Bush labeled his as a flip-flopper John Kerry, his Democratic rival in the 2004 election. Bush hammered Kerry for having voted in favor of the Iraq war while in the Senate and then campaigning against it for president. His foot was firmly implanted in his mouth, when Kerry famously later tried to explain why he voted to spend $87 billion in supplementary war funding for the Iraq invasion.
“I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it,” Kerry said.
As a Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton voted in October 2002 for a congressional resolution that authorized the use of force against Iraq. By September 2007, Clinton claimed that she hadn’t voted for a preemptive war. Her initial support for the war came back to bite her in the 2008 and 2016 Democratic presidential races.
“Obviously, if I had known then what I know now about what the President would do with the authority that was given him, I would not have voted the way that I did,” Clinton said somewhat obtusely.
Abortion is another hot button topic that politicians dance the jiggity jig around, depending on the direction of the hot air.
Scott Jensen, while vying for the GOP nomination for governor of Minnesota, said “We’re going to get something done when we’re governor: We’re going to ban abortions. That’s really not news.”
Later, as the campaign wore on, Jensen ran an equivocating ad saying that, “In Minnesota, [abortion] is a protected constitutional right, and no governor can change that. And I’m not running to do that.”
Blake Masters, as a candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona said abortion was “genocide” and that he was “100% pro-life” and supported “a federal personhood law.” As the winds of change shifted, Masters deleted the three references from his website and modified his position in support of banning abortion after 15 weeks.
Mehmet “The Wizard” Oz, while running for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania, said abortion was “murder” and that “life starts at conception.” Later, the “murder” references were set aside when Oz said “There should not be criminal penalties for doctors or women regarding abortion” and that he “supports exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.”
Noted fabulist, Republican Kari Lake, continues to insist that she won the race for Arizona governor even though no credible authority agrees with her. Formerly a staunch, staunch, staunch opponent of abortion, Lake now says that abortion should be “legal and rare.”
While a candidate, Lake supported reinstatement of a Civil War-era law that would prohibit virtually all abortions in Arizona. Then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Lake said, “We have laws on the books right now. We’re going to follow the laws that are on the books. If people don’t like the laws on the books, then they need to elect representatives who will change the laws.”
And then there was Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who at 81 had no right to flip-flop with the best of them but he did. As Senate majority leader in 2016, McConnell claimed to be taking the high road when he refused to grant a confirmation hearing or a meeting in 2016 to Merrick Garland, Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Court.
McConnell said the choice of a new Supreme Court Justice should be made by the next president, to truly reflect the public sentiment, even though when Scalia died in February 2016, Obama still had roughly 11 months left in his second term.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said at the time. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Trump was elected and he named conservative, Republican Neil Gorsuch to succeed Scalia, as the court bloated with conservatives.
The high road has vanished now, as McConnell, the current Senate minority leader, said recently that he would not comment on whether he would allow a Supreme Court nomination to go through if a vacancy opened up and Republicans were in the Senate majority next year.
In other words, McConnell will do what he has to do to make sure the next Supreme Court vacancy is not filled by a Democratic president and Senate.
That is sleazy with a capital “S.”