Arrogance Unleashed

Back in 1999, when Jeb! Bush took office as our Governor, I thought I had encountered one of the most arrogant people on the planet. For Jeb! (and the exclamation point must be there for proper punctuation of his name), there was no Florida government before him. All that had preceded clearly was a void. For HE was the light that had come into the world, and he would remake and refashion this system to his liking.
It was, in a word, arrogant.
Now, we have Governor Rick Scott aka Lord Voldemort aka the billion-seven medicare thief. As I mentioned in my previous post this political megalomaniac is the first Governor in my recollection here in Florida to have had the streets that border our Capitol building renamed to reflect his victory and the clean sweep the Republicans made of all the cabinet positions and almost the entire state legislature. Democrats don't have enough votes to stop any legislation and will likely just have to sit back and watch as the Republicans shred the state to bits and sell it off to their favorite friends. In his speech, Voldemort made the Freudian slip of saying he was going to cut state agencies. What he meant to say, he explained, was state regulations.
Why, after all, should we hinder the ability of businesses to develop, dump, and drain down our natural resources?
I think worse than anything for me was that he is being allowed to carry on this way without anyone saying, "Whoa, now, wait a minute here!" I was embarrassed listening to my old network's coverage of the inauguration. There was the pre-speech fawning over the "poise" that Scott's daughters had shown at the different events (does it take that much poise to stand there and have your picture taken?). There was the unquestioned repeating of Scott's mantra to run Florida like a business (so I guess he'll be stealing more money from the feds to plug our budget deficit!). And then there was the covering for his gaffe about cutting state agencies. Since when do reporters become apologists for the arrogant people they cover?
Since I left the business, I s'pose.
It is typical of social networking that after a Facebook announcement of a protest to the inauguration, in which 850+ people said they'd be in attendance, only two actually appeared. Technically three, if you count me. One of them, a young man who appeared to be in his 20s, managed to be the voice in the wilderness crying out, "Criminal!!" as Scott spoke to the relatively tiny inaugural day crowd. He reportedly was escorted away by police. But that one man, gripping his plastic Dr. Pepper bottle, was the only one who got it right yesterday. Not only is Scott a man who really should be in an orange jump suit breaking up rocks somewhere, but it is criminal that he was elected, and criminal that our media goes merrily along. To close out their coverage of the event, Florida Public Radio played "Tis a gift to be simple." How ironic.