Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government

[muriel_volestrangler]

David Roth on his (subscription) Defector site. Via Balloon Juice, where there is a gift link that has worked for me:

The most important thing to know about both the chittering Renfields gnawing through the ductwork of the American administrative state and the billionaire sociopath they serve is that they don't care. Every bit of damage they have done and will do springs from and follows this fundamental fact. They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.

They do not care about or understand the state because they do not acknowledge that it is valid; they do not care about or understand public service or public servants because they refuse the premise that such things could even exist. This goes beyond the private sector's familiar and self-flattering disdain for the public sector, which amounts to the load-bearing assumption that everything and everyone operating outside of the free market is somehow the minor leagues. There is another opposition at work here, a crabbed and curdled worldview that reflects libertarianism's signature balance of ideological resentment and pure childish certitude, and which is defined by the smash-and-grab anti-ethos of the vandal, but which is finally simpler and stupider than either.

Moment by moment, Musk and his strike force of greasy Beavisoid wreckers are rats in the walls, gnawing hideously through the wiring in search of richer fare. There is public money in there somewhere, and they believe it is theirs by right. Musk and his super-class of tech freaks want to get fat on it, to rescue that money from public uses that they view as inherently inefficient and unjust—spending that is "waste, fraud, and abuse" because of the ends to which it is deployed, which are public, and because of who is deploying it, which is not them. It is important to them, as a matter of efficiency and justice, that more of that money end up with them. In more deserving hands, that public wealth will be protected from the grasping public, and can be put to the uses this cohort prefers: building bigger homes behind bigger walls, booking The Chainsmokers to play 45-minute sets at the absolute worst parties in human history, hiring Famously Combative Attorneys and buying political suction, discreetly settling their endless skein of sexual harassment lawsuits. Rich person things. Real stuff.

The reflexive belief that all public stuff is fundamentally less valid and less real for being public—that the people doing public work are lazy, weak, and mediocre, and that the work they do is inherently inefficient and wasteful—is the downstream efflorescence of the toxic reactionary sludge that has been getting dumped into the water table for generations now; it is old, dumb, and very boring. The work of redirecting all those institutions built to serve the public good into something like their opposite isn't really all that new, either. That is more or less what "conservative governance" is, and what it reliably does: turning the Department Of Labor into a rubber stamp for predatory bosses, turning the Environmental Protection Agency against the environment and the U.S. Agency For International Development into something aimed more squarely at punishment and degradation.
...
https://defector.com/billionaire-dipshit-and-his-strike-team-of-greasy-beavises-are-stripping-the-wires-from-the-federal-government

("Renfield": a character in Bram Stoker's Dracula: " He is Count Dracula's deranged, fanatically devoted servant and familiar, helping him in his plan to turn Mina Harker into a vampire in return for a continuous supply of insects to consume and the promise of immortality. Throughout the novel, he resides in an asylum, where he is treated by Dr. John Seward." Roth is an expert essayist.)

[Irish_Dem]

1. It was predicted Trump would take the country down to the studs.

This was a very correct prediction.

[Irish_Dem]

2. Excellent article and chilling.

[ms liberty]

3. Wow. Masterful writing. I feel every word. Brilliant.

[cachukis]

4. A manifestation of the rot of capitalism that is

expanded from pockets here and there to a mestastization from which we may not survive.
We are in need of some serious examination.