Theater of Ron

Another day, another appalling story about Ron DeSantis—his "law enforcement relocation plan" that has spent $13.5 million luring anti-vaxx cops from other states to move to Florida with no vaccine mandate ad $5,000 payments up front has recruited some really bad officers:

They include a former trainee deputy with the Escambia county sheriff’s office charged with murdering her husband; an officer with the Miramar police department fired for domestic battery and kidnapping; and a former member of the New York police department (NYPD) who was hired by the Palm Beach police department having once been accused of an improper sexual proposition.

That officer, named by the Daily Dot [which is responsible for the reporting] as Daniel Meblin, was also part of a $160,000 settlement by the NYPD for violence at a 2020 protest against the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in which officers were accused of beating Black males without provocation.

More Perverts

 

People, I've been reading the Complaint in the $10-million suit filed in Manhattan court yesterday against Rudolph Giuliani by Noelle Dunphy, who worked as his Director of Business Development from January 2019 to January 2021, at a salary of $1 million a year plus expenses, which he never paid her, because this was during the protracted process of his third divorce, and

he told Ms. Dunphy that her pay would have to be deferred and her employment kept “secret” until the divorce proceedings finished. He claimed that his “crazy” exwife and her lawyers were watching his cashflow, and that his ex-wife would “attack” and “retaliate” against any female employee that Giuliani hired. Giuliani promised Ms. Dunphy that his divorce would be resolved “any day now,” and therefore the deferral of her pay and the need to keep her employment secret would soon end.

And that's not all, as you've probably heard by now; he started sexually harassing her from the first day—

As he was preparing to leave, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that since they would be working from different locations that week, he would like it if Ms. Dunphy sent him some flirtatious photos.

and in the first week, in New York on a business trip, insisted that she stay at his apartment (he has a guest suite), got her drunk, and forced her to give him oral sex, before taking her out to dinner with Lev Parnas (remember him? this is all happening as we're building up to the Ukraine scandal and the first Trump impeachment, and Lev is around a lot). Before you knew it, this had become a major part of her job:

"Just How People Get Into Politics"

 

Marcel Proust's fictional character Palamède de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, in a drawing by Jean Cocteau, ca. 1921-23, via. 

Warning, this is incredibly distasteful, so much so that I think a lot of journalists are telling themselves it's not newsworthy so they can stop themselves from thinking about it, but if you do think about it, it starts to seem important, as a sign of what the Republican Party is now and where it's going, hopefully toward total collapse.

The story goes back to last January, when the House Republicans were struggling to elect a speaker over the hostage-taking tactics of their most radical faction, not including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had made some kind of private deal, presumably over committee seats, with Leader Kevin McCarthy, and was supporting him.

Upon which a voice arose from outside of Congress, that of Ali Alexander, organizer of the Stop the Steal movement following the 2020 election and January 6 defendant, in a remarkably vituperative attack on Greene,

You are a harlot and a liar. You supported Q. You talked about Jewish people and now you denounce people who talk about Jewish power? Now you want to act like you're not into conspiracies? Girl, go get your teeth fixed. Mine are crooked cause I'm not a multimillionaire. Why are yours crooked?

culminating in a fairly specific threat: