Remember Rebekah Jones? She’s the dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) who bravely risked her career, reputation and even her life to be the whistleblower who brought down the evil DeSantis administration. Jones saved America from Emperor DeSantis by having the courage to expose how she’d been forced to change COVID data at FDOH to reflect more favorably upon the Dark Lord of the Sunshine State. She was mercilessly fired for her noble efforts.

Nope…wait…that’s wrong. That’s the story Democrats have been telling each other since this story broke last spring. Let’s start over.

Remember Rebekah Jones? She’s the dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) who locked her bosses out of FDOH data dashboards and then shared dishonest representations of the data with the media and without permission. When she was confronted and eventually fired, she went to a media desperate for any bad DeSantis news and spun a story about being let go for refusing to manipulate COVID data on behalf of FDOH to make it look like deaths and infections were much lower than being reported. In reality, she was fired for her refusal to stop manipulating data to the press.

Jones was of course greeted with a heroine’s welcome by a fawning, incurious press. Her story quickly fell apart and continued to devolve as her past criminal activities and employment confrontations came to light. Jones went from whistleblower to whacko in a matter of days. From National Review:

One is almost left impressed by the strange alchemy with which Jones manages to transmute her own bad behavior into lucrative victimhood. A 342-page “manifesto” that Jones penned in 2019 gives example after example of this tendency. She manages to cast herself as the injured party in the passages in which she describes violating a no-contact order to engage with an ex-boyfriend, damaging his car, and harassing his mother. She also manages to cast herself as the victim in the parts in which she records being fired from Florida State University for having sex with a student in her office and for lying to her employer about her criminal record. She even presents herself in defensive terms in a now-removed part of the document that contains explicit text messages between her and her ex-boyfriend, as well as close-up photographs of the man’s genitals.

But our political system loves a good whacko, and after raking in over $300K from a Go Fund Me campaign, the former dashboard manager has now decided to find herself a permanent grift…Congress.

This week Jones launched a bid for the swamp.

She’ll be running against Congressman Matt Gaetz, who currently sits in one of the most solidly red seats in Congress. Gaetz has been shoring up his conservative bonafides by crisscrossing the country as a MAGA conservative alongside Marjorie Taylor-Greene. As Jake Tapper pointed out, he has his own legal issues to contend with.

Gaetz’ legal issues may be causing him some problems but they seem to pale in comparison to Jones’ record of misconduct, stalking and general nuttery.

But this is America, and nuttery is our bread and buttery (someone put that on a t-shirt). Also, if there’s a guaranteed way to rake in mountains of cash temporarily it’s running for a nationally recognized political seat. A few people even manage to solidify the grift and go on to become permanent leeches attached to the flesh of the public. It’s probably a win-win for a woman like Rebekah Jones.

Fired, controversial Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones launches bid for Congress @tomforemancnn reports pic.twitter.com/s2XaUxBeSH

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) October 27, 2021

Tapper plays the report pretty straightforward and he’s admitted in the past that his media colleagues have been too quick to lionize Jones; however his Democrat, talking-head reflexes won’t allow him to be negative about a woman who could have taken down DeSantis if we lived in a world where the internet didn’t exist. He calls her a “data scientist” when she was really a glorified website technician and the CNN package can’t help but carry a desperate whiff of hope. Matt Gaetz is a thorn in the side of many Democrats. The opportunity to unseat him is too glorious to ignore.

Good luck to Ms.Jones in her political career. If she makes it to congress she can join the crazy-eye squad. Won’t that be fun?