ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE (profanity alert):

On his very first day in Congress -- long before he began to preen as a potential presidential candidate - Ron DeSantis proved that he was unfit to hold the highest office in the land. The date was January 4, 2013, and he cast his maiden vote on the House floor against $9.7 billion in federal flood insurance aid for victims of Hurricane Sandy, which had devastated New York and New Jersey.

Now, nearly a decade later, that vote strikes a stunning chord of hypocrisy and cruelty, when he is pleading for far larger sums from Washington to rebuild the communities destroyed by Hurricane Ian in his home state. With his characteristic arrogance, DeSantis abruptly dismisses any questions about his self-interested reversal as "politics" and "pettiness."

Back when he voted "no" on Sandy aid to the northern states, DeSantis pretended to be a fiscal conservative. He claimed to sympathize with the victims of that storm but wasn't inclined to send them any help beyond the usual Republican thoughts and prayers. According to him, increasing the flood insurance program's debt at that time "with no plan to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere is not fiscally responsible."

That finger-wagging and penny-pinching is entirely absent from the letter DeSantis sent a few days ago to President Joe Biden. Instead, he urged the administration to provide "100 percent reimbursement" for the hurricane damage suffered in southwest Florida. Nowhere did his letter suggest - and in none of his media appearances has the governor ever said - that the White House should first identify "budget offsets." (In fact, DeSantis had earlier abandoned all that sanctimonious noisemaking when he voted in October 2017 for a $36.5 billion relief bill after a trio of catastrophic storms struck Florida. That bill contained no offsets either. The following year, DeSantis ran for governor.)

The Biden administration has received a rare request from Cuba's government to provide emergency assistance following the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian, according to communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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