Steve Benen puts one of the recently evolved attributes of the GOP on display:
But if the Florida Republican has grappled with this aspect of the issue, he has hidden his concerns well. DeSantis has a vision that entails deploying troops into Mexico, executing drug smugglers, and possibly even using drone strikes on Mexican soil.
In case this isn’t obvious, Mexico is a U.S. ally, a U.S. neighbor and our biggest trading partner.
It would also apparently become a military target in a prospective DeSantis administration.
As bizarre as this might sound, the governor’s over-the-top rhetoric has become surprisingly normal in contemporary GOP politics. In March, for example, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said the Trump administration made “a mistake” by not launching military strikes in Mexico. A month later, Politico published a report that said: “A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away.”
Well, yes. When a party discards respect for competency and mastery of nuance in favor of extremism, this should be no surprise. Comer, Gaetz, Greene, and so many have others have learned well the lessons taught to them by the GOP base, that base preferring easy-to-understand extremism, or to put it another way, positions that are “pure” and untainted by compromise.
Their intellectual laziness runs them into a ditch every thirty feet they drive, and their arrogance leads them to deny that they’re in the ditch. And so we’re left with simpleton proposals like DeSantis, and I’m left wonder if his alma mater, Yale Law School, should really be shut down for letting this guy besmirch their legacy.
