Get Mickey 1 flopped. Get Mickey 2 fizzled. Now we have Get Mickey 3: The Futility. Ron DeSantis said he’d beat up the Walt Disney Co. He didn’t manage that, so he’s emitting noise and hitching his pants. Disney won’t get away with its untoward wokeness, he says, not after he teaches them a lesson via his mastery of government detail. It hasn’t worked out that way. The Governor’s blundered twice in his attempts to punish Disney; the third round finds him scrounging for pebbles. One can hear the voice of Donald Trump, assuming the boys ever face off. DeSantis says maybe he’ll stick some road tolls and higher property taxes on Walt Disney World, and Trump says, “Eighty billion a year, that’s what they make. Disney’s going to care? They’re going to care about the tolls? Eighty billion,” and so on.
If Waddling wants to be president, he’s got to make Disney look like a dickless loser sometime during the next few months. He can’t beat Trump if Disney’s beating Ron DeSantis, and Disney’s been doing that. GOP voters need to see him make that gay-loving company suffer and suffer bad. Of course, the longer you take trying to make somebody suffer, the worse you end up looking: spiteful, small, and (if you’re acting as a holder of public office) remarkably frivolous about the use of government power. But Mean Dukakis can’t process that level of human-interactional complexity. He’s programmed with a tape where the savvy caller-of-shots wows the room by sticking it to the bad guy, in this case a company that said public schools should be able to teach kids about gayness.
Florida’s wide-hipped chief executive was going to be the man who killed Reedy Creek, the pocket government that allowed Disney a free hand with Disney World. But the pet government owed money and had to keep paying its debts, so DeSantis told lawmakers to put the thing back after telling them get rid of it. The second time around, he decided he’d appoint the people in charge of the district. Hitting on this change of direction took him a while, and during that time Disney lined up agreements with the district’s old team; these give the company a free hand, or largely free, in developing its properties there. Genius found out about this when everyone else did.
If he’d made his kill on the first go, the Governor might be a hero right now (to those of a certain sort). Instead, he’s trapped in the spotlight, talking about how he’ll stick pins—he’ll inspect the rides, he’ll build something where Disney doesn’t want it. He’ll be a pest and nuisance, or maybe just a wannabe pest and nuisance. He mistakes that for seeming like a hero. This thoroughgoing glitch of vision makes DeSantis remarkable. He assumed he had Disney the first time. He assumed he still had them the second time. The third time, he thought he’d go out and sell the “possibilities are endless” bit, the one about sticking a prison somewhere. He traveled to Lake Buena Vista so he could do it special, under Disney’s nose. He thought he was going to score.
Great leaders have a reality distortion field. Mean Dukakis has a field that cuts inward; it’s his reality that gets distorted. Now he wants to debate Donald Trump and all one can say is “Who knows? I mean, I just think that the possibilities are, are, are endless.”