BREAKING NEWS: Playing with other people’s lives and losing

The results of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s experiment with the lives of Floridians are in and they are disastrous.

Sunday, the state reported 15,300 new cases of Covid-19. That is the largest total ever recorded by any state in the nation since the pandemic began.

The Republican governors of Texas, Arizona, Alabama, and other red states that rushed to reopen in obeisance to Donald Trump’s diktat all deserve an F in the subjects of political courage and common sense. But for Ron DeSantis, whose state just set a new national record, one would need to invent a lower grade. I would go with negative infinity, but I have already used that. So, I will go with Ѿ, which comes closest visually to the idea I am trying to convey about DeSantis. (Ѿ is a special Unicode symbol in Word.)

Finally, to clarify a couple of ideas. DeSantis is not the only Ѿ, only the biggest. A diktat is “an order or decree imposed by someone in power,” like Donald Trump. That order, not science or respect for human life, is what has the GOP governors march their people straight into the spines of the coronavirus, spines as deadly as those of a lionfish. Donald Trump’s command, plus the disdain for facts and evidence endemic in the GOP, made DeSantis (Ѿ) and others like him (Ѿ) drive their citizens into the maws of the monster.