Ron DeSantis smiles… or is about to bite?
Tiger Beat on the Potomac (thanks Charlie!) morning email thingie has a round-up of comments on Meatball’s* new book, The Courage to be Free:
— “[T]he overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.”
— “For the most part, ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”
— “Of his childhood baseball team making the Little League World Series, he says: ‘What I came to understand about the experience was less about baseball than it was about life. It was proof that hard work can pay off, and that achieving big goals was possible.’ You have to imagine that DeSantis, a double-barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law School), put a bit more verve into his admissions essays.”
— “Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is chilling — unfree and scary.”
— “Reading books, even bad ones, can be a goad to thinking, but what DeSantis seems to be doing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is to insist that Americans should just stop worrying and let him do all the thinking for them. Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as ‘woke’ nonsense cooked up by the ‘corporate media.’ (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and News Corp, which owns the publisher of this book, doubtless don’t count.)”
That devastating ChatGPT line is from the The NYTimes, and I wanted to see it in context, so you do too:
“As governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been casting himself as a Trump-like pugilist. But the overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.”
“Not that he admits any of this, peppering The Courage to Be Free with frequent eruptions about ‘the legacy media’ and ‘runaway wokeness.’ But all the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core…”
“For the most part, The Courage to Be Free is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”
I’m sure his PAC will do the Pompeo thing (buy up the copies to put it on the best seller list).
- Lord Damp Nut’s nickname for DeSantis, not ours.
Mock Paper Scissors 
Wowser. The Tiger Beat review was both brutal and accurate. Someone should get a promotion for writing it…
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Ivy League Meatball*.
It’s really a shame that moniker has an anti-Italian tinge. In Junior High, we called the class bully Meatball (out of earshot, of course), and his heritage and name were as Polish as the day was long. He ended up in jail, BTW.
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I wonder what the going rate is for reading dreck like this. I hope no one has to do it on their own time.
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I would be very surprised if anyone read it, and I’m sure that was always the point. Times sure have changed – Mein Kampf was meant to be read and probably was by a huge cross section of German people who were moved to action by the story of one man’s spiral into antisemitism and political ambition through fear and “othering”.
Now, nearly 100 years later, Mein Mut (Google translate tells me that’s My Courage) might use those tactics, but it’s far more likely to be a self-aggrandizing narcissistic monument to the ultimate Florida Man. A Barbie Diary from his high school days published without the hearts drawn around the day he beat down “one of them”.
This won’t be read, it was never intended to be read. I mean, at best his target audience is barely capable of chewing the pages. He doesn’t need a book to do his indoctrination. He as people for that.
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his target audience is barely capable of chewing the pages
Unfair! They love eating paste. It’s their least destructive habit.
TBH, I wasn’t concerned with the mouth breathers, I meant the reviewers.
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It makes me wonder how many Tons of books are stacked up in warehouses, waiting for a decision on what to do with that much waste. Bought up by organizations hoping to promote the author at the cost of burying the book itself. We need to make those tell-all political books in a recyclable form. Heck, you can’t even use them in the birdcage.
These are the books they should ban if they ban any.
w3ski
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