False Equivalence: "Biden and DeSantis have put aside being nasty to each other"

Really?

For President Biden it is sincere, for Gov. DeSantis it's all about optics.

By Hal Brown

Scroll down to read stories that piqued my interest today

Someone on MSNBC was describing President Biden and Gov. DeSantis talking on the phone about the devastation of the hurricane and the need for federal assistance showed that people can put aside their nastiness basically for the common good.

It is a sign of the times that we have stories like this:

Biden, DeSantis put politics aside with Hurricane Ian bearing down

EXCERPT: After talking to Biden, the governor went on air with Fox News’s Sean Hannity and lauded the administration’s response to the hurricane so far.
“When people’s lives and their property are at risk like this, we all need to work together regardless of party lines,” DeSantis said. “It’s my sense that the administration wants to help.”

Oh come one! Of course when there's a disaster presidents and governors of opposing parties work together even if the are worse than rivals, even when one of them has an easy going personality and is slow to anger and the other has a nasty streak as wide as the white stripe on a skunk and is just as eager to spray his stink on anyone or any group that he wants to hurt.

Click image to enlarge:

DeSantis wants to keep Florida free, free from migrants, LGBT+ people, anyone he considers "woke", librarians and teachers who tell the truth, basically anyone who disagrees with him on anything. Of course when it comes to federal aide, he'll readily take it and claim as much credit as he can for helping Floridians put their lives back together.

It is breaking news when President Biden expresses anger, for example:

Angry Biden Screams: ‘I Don’t Want to Hear Any More of These Lies About Reckless Spending!’

It stuck me that Biden and DeSantis would eschew being nasty to each other because of the devastation of hurricane Ian was an outrageous false equivalence.

From Wikipedia:

False equivalence is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency. Colloquially, a false equivalence is often called "comparing apples and oranges." This fallacy is committed when one shared trait between two subjects is assumed to show equivalence, especially in order of magnitude, when equivalence is not necessarily the logical result. False equivalence is a common result when an anecdotal similarity is pointed out as equal, but the claim of equivalence does not bear scrutiny because the similarity is based on oversimplification or ignorance of additional factors.

Biden has been excoriated by Republicans but it's never been for being a nasty man. DeSantis... well his stock in trade is being nasty to the core.

This is the last time Biden and DeSantis were pictured meeting together. It was following another catastrophe.

From the article:

3. Shaky relationship for DeSantis and Biden
DeSantis and Biden have had a contentious relationship. Just a week into the new president's term, DeSantis called "disingenuous" White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s claim that Florida had not doled out more than 50% of its vaccine supply. A month later, DeSantis called "absurd" and "unconstitutional" reports that the White House was mulling domestic restrictions for states, like Florida, where there was, at the time, a rise in COVID cases.
4. Allies after Surfside?
Since the Surfside building disaster, the Biden-DeSantis relationship has been publicly cordial and all business. The two men spoke the day after the structure's collapse and discussed the "heroic" efforts of emergency workers. That discussion followed the Biden administration's issuing an emergency declaration for Miami-Dade County. DeSantis has also been holding daily joint briefings in Surfside with a Biden ally in Miami-Dade County, Democratic Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

The USA article reminds us of the last time a Democratic President hugged a Republican governor during a crisis.

Bipartisanship aside, don't expect a Biden-DeSantis embrace. A hug is the lasting image of the last time a Democratic U.S. president was greeted in the state by a Republican Florida governor during an emergency. That is when then-President Barack Obama and then-Gov. Charlie Crist met in Fort Myers in 2009. Democrat Obama came to Florida to pitch a $787 billion stimulus plan. Crist, the state's Republican governor at the time, greeted Obama in a spirit of bipartisanship.
According to Crist, the two shook hands and then Obama leaned in to give him a hug that Crist later said wasn't anything "special." In 2014, Crist, then running for governor as a Democrat, wrote a first-person account of the encounter for Time magazine in which he said: "I didn’t know it yet. But that high-spirited day in Fort Myers—meeting Obama (bad enough) and greeting him with a hug (even worse) — ended my viable life as a Republican politician. I would never have a future in my old party again. My bipartisan hopes and dreams, I would discover soon enough to my shock and disappointment, were vastly overstated and hopelessly out of date."

No-brainer:

President Biden will go to Florida. He will meet with Gov. DeSantis and there will be photos of them both looking concerned and all business.

There will be no hugs.

I won't even click on this or provide you with a link to right-winger Thiessen's Washington Post column.

All DeSantis is showing is that he can play act a being presidential, or in this case acting like a governor ought to act in a disaster. In between tormenting and traumatizing migrants and demonizing the LGBT+ community of Florida he can put aside the persona that has rightfully earned him the Twitter hashtag of DeSatan.

-----------

Related: On Twitter

Other news that piqued my interest today.

The Supreme Court Returns on Monday, Stronger and More Terrible Than Ever

This term, the high court will cement its grip on political life in America, overturning affirmative action and other critical protections along the way.

Obviously this isn't the biggest news story of the day but I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't pleased to read this. I doubt we'll hear the real reasons for this anytime soon.

There's not much available online about husband Perry Greene. This is what I could find from this website:

Speaking of Perry Greene’s academics, he went to the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in accounting from there back in 1996.
Net Worth and Career Details of Marjorie husband, Perry Greene
The 48-years-old, Perry Greene is estimated to hold an impressive net worth of $2 million as of 2020. Indeed, he is a millionaire; however, not only him but his better-half, Marjorie also hold that tagline. It is believed that her fortune touches $4 million.

Does Roger Stone have a new tattoo on his back

By Hal Brown

This is from Heather Digby Parton's column:

Is a major bombshell coming? It sure looks like it

If there is one prominent through-line connecting the two most corrupt presidents in U.S. history, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, it would have to be the person of Roger Stone. The man has been at the heart of every election scandal for the past 50 years and he's still at it, even today. It's quite a legacy for the guy who has Richard Nixon's face tattooed on his back. It's lucky he left his chest clear for his last great cause, Donald Trump. Stone's work on Trump's behalf provides the perfect coda to a legendary career as a political dirty trickster and world-class black-ops conspiracy-monger.
Stone has had his fingerprints on every nefarious deed the Republicans have pulled in the last half-century, starting when he was a kid working on Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972, and given the job of spying on rival campaigns and finding devious ways to embarrass them in the press. He has said that during the day he was a scheduler but at night, he was "trafficking in the black arts."

I decided I didn't have anything to say by way of a comment to this column, so I simply posted this:

I wonder what the other inmates will think of it in the group showers. He looks here to be a muscle muscle-bound hombre so

he may be safer than a diminutive felon, although if an Never-Trumper and bigger badder inmate decided he didn't like the full-of-himself Stone and wanted to Trump in the eye and express his anger...

better not go there!

We know which prison gang he'd join up with. For his sake he'd better hope they'd accept him because its better to have friends in prison and not be a loner.

If a member of the Aryan Brotherhood was going to have a tattoo of any world leader on his back it wouldn't be Nixon or Trump.

From Wikipedia:

Criminal information
Criminal status	Pardoned, following commutation.

Criminal charge	Felony counts of: Witness tampering Obstructing an official proceeding Making false statements to Congress
Penalty	40 months in federal prison (Stone served no time as President Donald Trump commuted his sentence, then pardoned him.)

Inmates learning about this might not appreciate that they are serving time while Stone avoided this through a pardon.

Criminal information
Criminal status	Pardoned, following commutation.

Criminal charge	Felony counts of: Witness tampering Obstructing an official proceeding Making false statements to Congress
Penalty	40 months in federal prison (Stone served no time as President Donald Trump commuted his sentence, then pardoned him.)

Stories that piqued my interest:

My illustrated comment:

While I'd have liked to she her testify on live TV I think there is a benefit to her do so virtually. By this I assume it would be by Zoom or some other way so she'd be in her home or someplace where she felt comfortable. This would be likely to give her a false sense of security and she might be less guarded in how she responded to questions. Of course she might take the Fifth to every question she's asked. I think much depends of how much of a true believer she is when it comes to considering Trump a deity with a God given right to rule, and that her husband is functioning like God's right hand.