"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Sunday, February 9, 2025

So, Sue Me! - Why The Left Will Never Understand The Mean Streets Behind Trump's Putsch

Washington has been in a tizzy since Elon Musk has been let loose and is cutting a swath through the bureaucracy.  The Left, locked in their own dark, commiserating closet, assumed that Trump would make good on his promise to reduce the size and influence of government; but never in a million years did they think it would happen like this - a putsch, a pogrom, Kristallnacht, SS storm troopers breaking into government agencies in the dead of night, rounding up bureaucrats like old Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.  They knew that Trump was capable of such genocide, but they never actually thought it would happen.

 

Bob Muzelle sat disconsolately on the steps by the fountain in Lafayette Park overlooking the White House - a serene, settled place from the outside; a place of considered governance, an icon of America - but now transformed into the headquarters of the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, and the Nazi high command. 

Of course the White House had seen troubles in the past - Watergate, the plumbers, and 'I am not a crook' Richard Nixon - but nothing like this.  Nixon was a pussy compared to Donald Trump, a dangerous, reckless, soulless man out to destroy America and remake it into his own twisted, perverted image. 

'What's a mother to do? thought Bob.  The cloying, annoying advertising jingle of the 1960s kept popping into his head at the most inopportune times, but was telling him something - despair was part and parcel of the human condition, preparatory to action.  The pert, trim housewife sternly looking over her lovely family with pique - she had spent hours cooking - was the image which blocked Bob's view of the avenue, the lawn, and the North Portico of 1700.  He shook his head.  'We must organize!'. 

 

He thought back to his days on the Pettis Bridge with Martin and Ralph, the Freedom Rider bus trips to Selma, and the March on Washington - heady days of promise and optimism - but now only saw Armageddon.  He and his colleagues had pulled out every stop to defeat Donald Trump, marshalled every resource, challenged with skirmish and open field assault; and nothing had worked.  Not only that, he was now full of fiery vengeance, Siva The Destroyer, God before Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Of course anyone who had followed Donald Trump's career, especially the mean real estate streets of New York knew quite well what he was up to.  Intimidation, threat, and bullying were the stock and trade of the market.  No one gave an inch despite the billion dollar law suits, the legal and financial onslaughts, and the terrorizing barrage of affidavits and depositions; and even then gave it up millimeter by millimeter. 

Trump had been brought to trial by New York prosecutors who accused him of cooking the books, of inflating real estate value in an attempt to snooker potential buyers. 

Of course he added tens of thousands of dollars of value to his various Trump Towers, hotels, and commercial properties.  In the bareknuckle arena of New York real estate this was all par for the course.  Buyers and sellers would inflate, deflate, overrepresent, and underrepresent, challenging, threatening, and suing to beat the band.  No one, especially Donald Trump ever flinched.  In the unlikely event that any issue ever came to court his army of defense attorneys would either have the case dismissed or adjudicated with minimum damage to their client.  Legal fees and fines were part of the cost of doing business in New York. 

 

So when Elon Musk on Trump's order marched into the offices of USAID, turned over desks, emptied file cabinets, tossed computers onto the street, and escorted hundreds of shellshocked bureaucrats out the door, the President knew that the legality if not constitutionality of his actions would be challenged in court and that he might even lose; but in the barroom battle of politics, he would win. 

By the time legal challenges ever reached the courts, USAID would be an empty shell and its workers blown to the four winds.  His primary goal - reducing the size and influence of government - will have been attained, and the consequences of so doing, if any, were worth the minor risk. 

The whiners continued to howl.  'How could he? How dare he?' but there was no way on earth that they would be able to stop the panzer Anschluss.   

A group of Democrats assembled outside the doors of the Department of Education, next on the Trump-Musk agenda for shuttering.  One Congressional representative, as meanspirited and ugly as they come, yelled at the guard at the gate who was as implacable and immovable as a Queen's Beefeater Guard at Westminster. Her face a twisted, demonic caricature of some Satanic ghoul, she shouted and fumed to no avail.  She was the poster girl for the opposition.  All Sturm und Drang with no influence whatsoever.  

 

Bob, an old civil rights demonstrator had joined the Congresswoman and had been in the small crowd of protesters.  He felt the adrenaline rising as he did in days of old when he stood before Bull Connor and his ax-handle wielding thugs, but this was a desultory, ragged bunch of petty complainers who knew in their heart of hearts, standing there in the rain, they would make not one whit of difference to Donald Trump. 

What the Left saw as an anti-democratic attempt to uproot, toss, and dismiss the government of the United States, its laws, and its authority was nothing of the kind.  It was a classic 'So, sue me!' confrontation meant to overwhelm, cow, and force capitulation.  This time, Trump knew, the engagement would be a piece of cake.  He had been up against the toughest of the tough in New York in a no-holds-barred bloody brawl and he welcomed every bit of it.  

The political left, already discouraged, humiliated, and badly beaten in November, was barely able to stage a Punch and Judy show let alone take on the meanest man in Dodge. 

Bob, soaked through and disconsolate, made his way back to Scientists for Social Justice, the non-profit agency he founded and managed but soon to be as discarded and forgotten as quickly as USAID and the Department of Education in the sweep of Trump's structural reform.  On the street after so many good years, Bob mused; but this was not the way he had planned it.  No retirement parties, no speeches, and no applause; not even a recognition of the halcyon years, the years of righteous struggle, the good fight. 

Already everything in the office was in hock, for donations had become a trickle after the Trump victory.  Supporters knew that the new man at 1700 meant business, and along with DEI and windmills, the days of lonely hearts club commiseration were over. Not only was a Hitler in the White House, but Bob was out of work. 

'Don't worry, dear', said his wife of many years, herself a social justice warrior but a far more stable, realistic one than her husband, 'you've had a good run'; which of course were the very words he did not want to hear.  They were reserved for an old classmate who sailed through his 'development' career as smoothly and concern free as a ketch on a sunny lake.  He worked in the shitholes of Africa but dined like a king, bedded caramel-colored women, and retired content and guilt-free. 

Bob had been wedded to his work.  He believed in what he did despite the niggling doubts of relevance and worse, hanging out with dull, ugly women.  That was another thing.  Not only was Donald Trump trampling democracy, he was doing it with harem of beautiful blonde, blue-eyed trophy women.  

'Goddam him!', shouted Bob out the window to no one in particular.  'Goddamn him!'

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Donald Trump Channels The Robber Barons - Unbridled Ambition, Laissez-Faire, And Wealth Creation

The so-called Robber Barons of the early Twentieth Century -the great industrialists Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan- are icons of American history, responsible in large part for the creation of the great American industrial empire of steel, railroads, energy, and finance.  They had vision, ambition, will, intelligence, and a fearless sense of competition.  They brooked no comers, and worked to control and monopolize their economic investments and to expand them into other sectors of enterprise.  They were unstoppable, untouchable, and inviolate, and thanks to them America began its ascent to world power. 

Only a few times in history have such talent and remarkable creativity come together in a genius cluster.  The Founding Fathers were such cluster - how was it possible that Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, and Monroe came together at the same time?  What series of antecedents, variables, historical influences, and pure luck facilitated such an assemblage?  What factors predisposed the emergence of such Nineteenth Century Russian literary geniuses - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and others?

The Robber Barons fought hard against the demands of labor and any attempt by government to favor workers over owners.  Workers, while indispensable for the manual labor required to extract oil, build rail systems, and make steel, for industrialists were simply figures in an economic equation, pluses and minuses on a spread sheet manipulated to increase profit. 

This unfettered economic system was the engine of wealth creation.  The expansion of Vanderbilt's rail system provided thousands of jobs for the laborers who worked the line.  Carnegie's steelworks, vital for industry, employed thousands more.  The profits from their companies were invested in Morgan's banks and then invested in further economic activities. 

 

Given the nature of individual endeavor - a hardwired, ineluctable drive for survival, dominance, and control - and given the capitalist nature of the American economy, there are new titans - Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Brin, and Buffett - who have engineered the same economic revolution as their Robber Baron predecessors even while under the yoke of government surveillance and intervention. 

Economic innovation and transformation is not the result of some assemblage of workers and community organizer but the genius of the few, the unique, and the unusual.  The Robber Barons showed the way - that capitalist hunger, individual motivation, and absolute will are the sine qua non elements of economic progress.   

All of America was built this way.  What was more aggressively capitalist than the enterprise of big landowners in the South and West.  Such 'aggrandizement' led to the spread of economies of scale, mechanization, increased productivity and greater access to foodstuffs by the population.  

The West was won just as the East in the hands of Carnegie and Rockefeller was won - through will, determination and raw personal ambition.  Again, while land reforms and some measure of social support was welcomed, attempts to redefine capitalist enterprise to fit a more 'inclusive' model, is wrong-headed. 

 

Capitalists in any generation have ambition, confidence, will, vision, courage, and intelligence; and Carl Sandburg's poem Chicago said it best not only about the city he loved but about America:

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
            Bareheaded,
            Shoveling,
            Wrecking,
            Planning,
            Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
            Laughing! 

And so it is that Donald Trump will attempt to remake America - to return it to its earliest entrepreneurial roots, to rid society of neo-socialist progressivism and the ethos of wealth distribution. Through punitive regulation and taxation and uninhibited public spending, Joe Biden and his Congressional associates consolidated, expanded, and applied all the agencies of federal power to remake the country in their Utopian image.  

Heedless of the failure of Soviet-era communism and European socialism - both intended to create classless, economically equally societies - the former President pursued a policy that numbed individual enterprise, deflated personal ambition and innovation, and created a society of entitlement. 

Progressives still held to the idea that an equalizing social reform, one which transfers wealth from those who produced it to those who have not, is the best way to create their Utopian vision of social harmony, peace, and nobility.  America's early capitalists have been cancelled for their predatory injustice to the working man, their corporate greed, and trampling ambition.  Men are not supposed to act this way, and must be bound to a more compassionate, inclusive social contract.  

There is no room in America, say progressives, for the likes of Gould, Fisk, and the rest of them.  The infrastructure, wealth, and economic dominion they created was unparalleled, but instead of being credited with the founding of the modern American capitalist engine, they are dismissed, canceled, and relegated to insignificance. 

Trump unabashedly and proudly turns to these men for inspiration, example, and guidance.  They not only embody American enterprise but the most human enterprise.  Human beings have bought, sold, and bartered since the first Paleolithic settlements. They have promoted, advertised, raised or lowered prices according to supply and demand without education, training, or algorithms. Self-interest, the most hardwired trait of human nature, has always been expressed in the acquisition of land, resources, wealth, and power. 

 

Over the millennia the roughest edges of raw capitalism have been smoothed - the market operates far more efficiently when bloody conflict and the law of tooth and fang are moderated and tempered.  No one has ever succeeded in neutering aggressive self-interest, and society has learned to live with the inevitable disputes over value, territory, and ownership.  Regimes have tilted either left or right on this issue - some tending to reign in private enterprise and replace it with a more communitarian approach; others unleashing its mighty potential come what may. 

Donald Trump is among the latter.  He is a believer in the innate, hardwired self-interest of human nature, and knows that as always it has been the engine of wealth creation.  The freer enterprises are to pursue wealth and market dominance, the better off society will be.  Darwin understood this best - the survival of the fittest was no matter for arbitration or adjudication, but winners and losers in an evolutionary struggle. 

 

There is nothing wrong with recognizing, acknowledging, and feting the most productive in society - honoring them for their contributions and opening the way for them to continue.  Donald Trump, as witnessed by his Cabinet appointments is all in on capitalist enterprise and letting market forces determine outcomes.  Dirigisme, state financial dictates, and centralized planning are discredited socialist economic tools.  Supply will always respond to demand without government interference. 

A fair, equitable, objective justice system is the key to orderly economic progression. Justice recognizes free competition and the opposing forces within it, and adjudicates disputes between conflicting interests; and that is why Trump has given the reform of the Justice Department top priority.  It was used and abused by the previous administration to promote their political interests and to punish opponents, and now it must be restored to its former stature.  Free competition, government demurral, and a vigorous court system is the new ethos. 

Friday, February 7, 2025

The White Brigade Comes To Washington - Majority Rule Not Minority Interests, The New Trump Ethos

It is no coincidence that the face of the new Trump Administration,  Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, is a pretty, lily white, blonde, blue-eyed woman. 

 

The contrast to Biden's spokesperson who in her first press conference praised the President for choosing her, a gay, black, immigrant woman to the post, could not be more stark or telling.  White people are back, said the President, 'Get over it'. 

For four years Americans were subjected to progressive hammering about race, gender, and ethnicity - everything was about racism, identity, and diversity.  No opportunity was lost to harass voters for their white privilege, their settled racial elitism, and their stubborn refusal to see the Dawn of a New Age.  

Black people were on every television ad, on every school dais, in government, the private sector, and education.  DEI initiatives ensured that inclusivity was never an incidental issue but a front-and-center one, and tens of millions were spent on diversity seminars, special DEI offices, monitoring for offensive, racist speech, and the promotion of a general atmosphere of racial heterogeneity over all else. 

Millions of Americans, sick and tired of the lecturing, hectoring, and intimidation of the Left; and fed up with the disproportionate representation of black people, barely over ten percent of the population but for all intents and purposes looking like fifty, voted for Donald Trump who made good on his pledge abolish all racially woke programs. 

America is a majority white country, he said, and my Administration will reflect that demographic reality.  While the Left howled 'racism', challenging the President for his non-black Cabinet appointments, he replied once again, 'Get over it'. An administration of talent not identity will be my hallmark.  The net was cast widely, and as expected, most appointments were white. 

Why was that a surprise, asked the President. The highest levels of industry, computer engineering and software, finance, and the professions - despite desperate decades-long affirmative action programs - have few blacks in residence.  While the NFL and NBA are well over 90 percent black, no other industry even breaks par. 

Talent and excellence have not color, said the President; and when a person of color attains the highest level of achievement, creativity, ambition, and insight as his Asian and Caucasian counterparts, he will be selected and placed without reservation. 

The whole fallacy of latter-day affirmative action, a feel-good black Utopian white idealism, would be finally put to rest by the new President.  Sixty years of civil rights, presumptive racial priority, and affirmative action have had little demographic effect - inner cities are still dysfunctional and prisons are crowded with black offenders - and the culture of dependency and entitlement has only served to depress ambition, learning, and correct civil behavior.  A new ethos of responsibility and merit would do more for black communities than years of coddling, overbearing compassion, and cultural myopia. 

The Left of course, already stung, bloodied, and despondent over the election of Trump which most thought virtually impossible given the historical rightness of their cause, were hysterical as they watched the parade of whiteness march into town. 

First there was the election victory party at Mar-a-Lago, the new President's Florida estate where the only black and brown people in evidence were trimming the hedges, skimming the pool, and washing the dishes.  The rest of the gathering was lily white, as white as snow; not only that was so perfectly and spectacularly blonde, unblemished, beautiful, and statuesque. 

These marvelous blonde young things were acting as if nothing was amiss in this perfectly manicured, gloriously white event.  They were oblivious to the absence of color.  For many this was how they had been brought up, privileged, heirs to great fortunes, and legatees to family tradition.  For others, this was what Hollywood, screen tests, and Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johansson, Marilyn Monroe, and Margot Robbie were all about - the irresistibly blonde, blue-eyed icons of America. 

When photographs of the event were published and circulated, the Left was apoplectic.  How could years of affirmative action, the lionization of the black man, the pantheon of color, the tribute to African heritage, the overwhelming destiny of racial plurality have been wiped out so quickly?  It was unexpected and unthinkable, horrendously portentous.  If this was the cast of an all-night party at Mar-a-Lago, what would this mean for the White House and the country?

The wailing, breast-beating, and rending of garments by the aggrieved, humiliated, soundly defeated Left increased day by day.  Each victory party, each new round of hopefuls at Mar-a-Lago, each official appointment was a dagger in the heart of stunned, wounded, and disconsolate liberals.  Not only did a man they considered evil, a traitorous insurrectionist and dictator-in-waiting win the election; and not only would their 'progressive' agenda be tossed in the trash, but this unconscionable whiteness would be the meme, the ethos, the zeitgeist of the day. 

It was the last straw, the worst humiliation, the most damnable, inexcusable insult; but blustering and incoherent, they could only howl.  In a hackneyed Benneton ad of racial diversity they hugged each other in love, harmony, and sympathy.  We know what's right, they said, and that flame of righteousness will keep us for the next four years.  

 

While to the Left such white cavalcade seemed an in-your-face blunt racist statement, it was nothing of the kind.  Trump was only reflecting reality - white people were still in the majority, and even as their numbers declined, white European civilization was still at the very heart of America.  'Whiteness', soon to be colored with Asian tones, would still remain the ethos of the country - based on the foundational principles of Jefferson and the Enlightenment, fueled by Christian faith, and with a solid European moral core.  

American patriotism knew no color, only devotion to the concept of nation and its positive, productive, entrepreneurial values.   The black population had not yet joined this commonwealth of eager opportunity; but when it did, it would be welcomed.  For the time being however, its interests would be removed from the top tier of national priorities. 

'Buggering idiot...uber-racist...cad...Hitlerian Kristallnacht wannabee...pogrom-lover...brute', cried the Left blinded by Trump-hate. The last bits and pieces of woke racialism went swirling down gutters and into drains, into the Potomac and out to see.  They grasped and clutched at them but came up with nothing. 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Witches, Warlocks, And Macbeth's Weird Sisters - Donald Trump And The Sorcery That The Left Hath Wrought

Another week has gone by, and the incredulousness, shock, and disassembly of progressives - the total disbelief that Donald Trump, despite their years of warning and attempts to derail the juggernaut, is back in office - only increased. 

Not only that, with a flourish of his pen, he has dismantled each and every one of the Biden Administration's attempts to reform America to his measure - a discombobulated country of weird sexuality, black idolatry, and geopolitical compromise.  One by one the directives go, thrown out the door without a second glance, promises fulfilled and more to come. 

Just like his counterpart Javier Milei of Argentina, Trump has looked at the array of useless government departments, shouted Afuera! and tossed each and every one into the dumpster.  His avant-garde led by the Genghis Khan of the new Right, Elon Musk, is taking no prisoners as it defies the praetorian guard of USAID, upends the rabbit warren of cubicles, builds a bonfire with the circulars, memos, approvals, and endless papers that have clogged the machinery of government, and heads for more, up and down Independence and Constitution Avenues. 

The outrage is hysterical.  How could he?, shout Democratic minions.  How could he summarily and unconscionably throw peaceful Palestinians out of Gaza, leave a trail of pinafores and barrettes as he tosses transgenders to the curb, unleash the predatory wolves of Wall Street, and despoil the Earth? 

How could he? Because he is President of the United States with executive power and a 'So, sue me' attitude. The courtroom is his friend, not his enemy, and if legal challenges are raised against his putsch, so be it.  'I'll see you in court', the second verse of his mantra will be sung. 

'What about the poor workers that are doing good, the knighted, the honored, the best?' howls the Left, while the President, happy to see their bureaucratic diffidence, their toadying, and their arrogant assumptions of right finished, shouts 'Afuera!', as the line of USAID bureaucrats files out the door. 

Progressives, now actually believing the fear-mongering stories of evil they circulated before the election, and seeing the arrival of the sorcerous, demonic ruler they had warned about, were afraid of taking to the streets. 

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, recalled to illustrate the coming danger during the campaign, were, now in the face of reality, nothing but comic book characters.  

The horrific, despicable evil about to be unleashed on the nation beggars the imagination, progressives say, and will consign the architects of Auschwitz and the Great Leap Forward to the Metro section, incidental to the real holocaust about to happen on these very shores. 

'A sorcerer...', said Bob Muzelle, sputtering lines from Shakespeare, his only port in a storm. 'A weird sister...a harpy'; but these frail poetic notions were unsatisfying to say the least as he walked past the Ronald Reagan building and saw the pile of  USAID file cabinets, desks, water coolers, and roller chairs piled high on the street.  He flustered about, raising his arms to the sky like an Old Testament prophet, appealing to the God he had dismissed for years to come to the aid of the nation. 


They had it coming, said a Trump apologist.  There was no way that ten years of hammering, goading, ridiculing, and dismissing the President was going go unpunished.  He might have made good on his promise to reduce the size of government, lower taxes, remove punitive regulations, and open the country to energy exploration in any case; but this Anschluss, this Mongol putsch, this leveling, no-holds-barred, heads-on-spikes retributive disaster was harsh, punitive, and vindictive.

The job had to be done, so why not kill two birds with one stone - uproot and toss the clogging, nonsensical bureaucracies of Washington and at the same time frenzy the gobsmacked Left?

America has never seen a President like Donald Trump II - an irreverent, bombastic, devastatingly blunt man who understands power and uses it.  He is indeed like Putin and Xi, Machiavellians to the core, nationalists and historical patriots who have clear visions of restoring their once imperial nations to international supremacy.  Trump is not shy about his desire to return America to the position of world leadership it once had - an economic, military, and financial powerhouse that will beggar the ambitions of Russia and China. 

 

America voted for Donald Trump because he had the Machiavellian instincts of Xi and Putin; because he was as strong, determined, and defiant as they, and because he would always and inalterably promote American interests. 

It is the Left which, intellectually impoverished after its Utopian, deforming schemes had been outed for the frauds they were, dazed and confused by their summary dismissal, and given to childish tantrums about their loss, created Donald Trump II.  Their lack of temperance, their febrile, unhinged hatred, and their wildly improbable reformism, led to the fiery resurgence of an unintimidated and angry man. 

'Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble', incanted the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, and despite all Bob's efforts to tamp down the fearsome images of a sorcerer in the White House, up they came.  There was something indeed Satanic about the man, something that only a violent exorcism would right; but from where would this countervailing supernatural power come? 

No one was paying attention anymore to BLM's shouts for the rights of the black man, nor the gaggle of women on the Mall bitching about misogyny and MeToo abuse, nor the hyperbolic Cassandras of Global Warming.  The heady days of Selma, Montgomery, Freedom Rides, and 'I have a dream' were long gone.  A cold, dark, penitential winter was coming. 

A nasty wind rose up and blew up Pennsylvania Avenue, snapping the flag over the Trump White House.  All was quiet but trouble was brewing within in, Bob knew.  It looked so serene, pristine, and beautiful, America's home, now sullied and disgraced by the demon within.  Bob could never look upon it with any sense of pride, dignity, or patriotism.  It was a perverse, horrific, scary fun house. 

'Next', the President said after signing another one of the bevy of executive orders in front of him.  This will be a great day, he thought, smiling and happy. 



Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Bombast, The Guillotine, And The Folies Bergères - Musk, Trump, And The Greatest Show On Earth

We are supposed to take governance seriously.  After all, decisions made in the Oval Office affect all of us.  The President's finger is on the nuclear trigger, his executive orders can remake the order of things with the flourish of a pen, and his every word is heard around the world. 

Yet it is hard to take the caparisoned Musk cavalcade seriously, suddenly bursting into the offices of USAID - a vaudevillian Anschluss, an upending of inboxes, jackbooted guards at the exits singing the final ode of the Ring Cycle.  

Im Feuer leuchtend, liegt dort dein Herr,
Siegfried, mein seliger Held.
Dem Freunde zu folgen wieherst du freudig?
Lockt dich zu ihm die lachende Lohe?
FĂĽhl' meine Brust auch, wie sie entbrennt,
helles Feuer das Herz mir erfaĂźt,
ihn zu umschlingen, umschlossen von ihm,
in mächtigster Minne, vermählt ihm zu sein!

Siegfried, Donald, my lord and master!

Everywhere in Washington the Grand Guignol was repeated - tumbrels filled with bureaucrats headed for La Veuve, the guillotine, amidst cheering crowds.  The crowds grappling to get in to the Ronald Reagan building when Musk's first panzer divisions broke through the gates, pushed and shoved to get a glimpse of the roundup, cheering as each apparatchik, each mandarin, each revenue sucking parasite was tethered, tied, and thrown pele-mele into the curricle. 

 

As the tanks rolled down Independence Avenue, top floor windows were broken and G-15s clambered out onto rickety scaffolds swaying in the cold February wind and began to lower themselves, only to be corralled by the lynch mob below. 

Downtown Washington was at a fever pitch, and armored personnel carriers were on every corner.  SWAT teams and paramilitary legionnaires carrying bludgeons and battleaxes broke into the lobbies of one government department after another - Education, Social Welfare, Energy, Environment - followed by a rabble of cheering MAGA champions calling for blood.

Lines of coatless bureaucrats were lined up on the curb, hands tied behind their back, spat upon, kicked, and manhandled by the crowd while troopers stood by.  

Elon Musk, face and hands covered with blood, but holding the glorious banner of victory high over his head, emerged from the Reagan building to howls of delight, a backslapping, Mardi Gras moment of high drama.  Now, this is what I'm talking about, he said. 

 

If only it could have been so, and not the colorless affair that it was. Stunned workers wondering what they had done, deer-in-the-headlights gaping as their computers were confiscated, desks shaken and overturned as they were escorted to the exits.  Bureaucracies are warrens of incidental employees, cats' cradles of complexity with no way in or out; magical mazes duplicating each other, turning back on themselves designed with no outlet. 

 

When the Musk troops were back in their barracks, their leader sipped a brandy and smoked a Cuban with his boss who, generally abstemious, allowed himself the luxury of a feet up on the desk moment of celebration.  What a find, said the President about Elon Musk, a rabid street-fighting bully with more pissy, fuck you cojones than even he had. 
  
Elon is my man, he said over and over again to anyone within earshot; and after this day of capitulation, abject surrender of the worst, most garrulously inane of any Washington bureaucracy, a bunch of fairies, do-gooders, and diversity queers that never worked for a living and instead sucked the teat of the federal treasure...Well, no more, kiddos, no more. 

The two of them shared war stories - the mean streets of New York real estate and the bitchy world of Silicon Valley and lithium miners - and jostled each other to see who had the biggest number.  Neither let the other win, and each talked over the other citing KIA and titanic battles.  The Robber Barons had nothing on me, said Elon, and that was quite something.  After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan were no pussies and left no survivors. 


Meanwhile Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, went public with his criticism of the President's tariff policy.  Watch out, he said, come Super Bowl time, your Corona and guacamole dip will be more expensive, missing the point entirely but summing up the Democrat response to Trump's hectic week of executive orders.  That's all he could come up with, Tex Mex chips and beer, while The Man was making waves, telling the world how it is. 

Democrat Washington was a St. Vitus' dance - an spastic jumping and howling, a yipping and yelling, an incontinent whooping and tearing of hair - while the President and his minions were following a script he had written years ago.  He was only biding his time until the right moment. Now that he was back in the Oval Office elected by a significant majority and his party in control of all branches of government he could do what he pleased.  Draining the swamp, his campaign promise the first time around, was child's play compared to what he had in mind now. 


Uprooting the sycophantic, money-guzzling, inept and venal bureaucracies was one thing; but restoring America to full-bore power, influence, and geopolitical supremacy was another.  The USAID Saturday Night Massacre was only the beginning.  'So sue me', shouted Trump out the window and over the front lawn of the White House to the protestors in Lafayette Park.  

'Enough of this', Trump said to Musk; downstairs they went to watch the women of the Folies Bergères, their dates for the night, free as they were from the censorious, petty, Puritanical hectoring of the offended Left.  Back to the days of JFK, LBJ, and MLK, Lotharios all, sexual adventurers and macho men like their European counterparts.  Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Elysees, and Mitterrand's lover and illegitimate daughter mourned over his grave alongside his wife. 


Elon persuaded the American public that he worked all the time, but there was a time and place for everything, and he was very much looking forward to Mlle. de Villiers, la creme de la creme of the troupe, a lady of distinct charm and willingness. 

As for the President, he had Marilyn Monroe in mind as he sat overlooking the Rose Garden where Kennedy and Marilyn had tea before bed, and where he would begin what he hoped would be a series of dalliances to do Prince Camelot proud. 

'What's up tomorrow, boss?, Elon asked Trump, his blood still hot from that morning's raid.  It was a heady moment, that, standing there among the overturned cubicles, watching the bound and gagged royalists thrown into the tumbrel.  How he lived the moment, the blade of the guillotine shining brightly in the morning sun, the bucket ready to catch the first lopped head of the day.  He was in his element, at the top of his game, and as happy as could be.  

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

A Conservative In Indian Country - Running The Gantlet In La-La Land

John Hancock - no relation to the signer of the Declaration of Independence but no less of a patriot - lived in a tony, progressive neighborhood of Washington, a stone's throw from the White House now occupied by Donald Trump. 

 

The neighborhood, University Park by name, was the home to lawyers, non-profit managers, educators, and doctors, all of whom displayed Hate Has No Home Here, Black Lives Matter, and Biden-Harris lawn signs, who voted in lockstep for the Democratic Party and the most liberal members of the City Council.  

PTA meetings were all about diversity and inclusivity, and residents often hosted black-white get-togethers where black teachers from the inner city on special assignment to all-white Jarvis Elementary were entertained and feted for bringing the reality of urban life to racially homogeneous Ward 3. 

Casual conversations on Alling Street were more often than not about the devil downtown, the new resident of 1700 Pennsylvania, the despot-in-waiting, the usurper, the tyrant.  No introductions were needed on Alling Street, for all engaged were of the same stripe.  It was simply assumed that one was a member of the tribe, the clan, the group.  Who of friends and neighbors could possibly be a Trump supporter, a Republican, and a conservative? And so without hesitation, the chat turned to Trump's latest lies, fraud, and misinformation.

Hancock nodded to the assertions made - convictions long past any reasonable reflection and in autopilot mode - but he increasingly had difficulty in holding his tongue since to his neighbors the re-election of the President, tantamount to electing Beelzebub himself, was an unconscionable, unthinkable turn of events; and therefore prompted the most cockamamie, out-of-left-field impressions of deformed governance and irreparably immoral residence. 

The gym, the library, the coffee shop were no different - places of settled opinion, communal grief, and redoubts of resistance.  In fact there was nowhere he could go to feel himself, let loose some of the enthusiasm for Trump and the imminent social remake; so as a gesture of personal pique, he wore a red Rappahannock Oyster hat, a MAGA hat for all intents and purposes, to all venues. 

The looks, the raised eyebrows, the insolent stares were worth wearing the ill-fitting, now fish-stained cap, bought years ago on the dock of the Bay one summer afternoon overlooking Carter's Creek.

'Could it be?' was the irrepressible look on the face of his coffee mates, gym buddies, and library fellows.  Some mistake surely, not in this neighborhood; but there it was as plain as day, an apostate, a denier, a...words failed the crowd at this unexpected vision.  In Mississippi certainly. In Iowa perhaps, and in the redwoods of Humboldt County very likely, but here in Northwest Washington?

Mary Beth Barnum, a retired school teacher and volunteer for the Harris campaign and her husband Nick, a midlevel manager somewhere in Maryland, had been friends of the Hancocks for years; but the diapers and PTA meetings which had long held their interest, were long gone.  The Barnums could simply not countenance the harshly conservative views of their neighbor.  

Perhaps it was all for show - John was simply being John - but finally over limp chicken and stiff broccolini (Mary Beth had never been able to cook her way out of pot roast and mashed potatoes) he let fly with a virtual torrent of invective, twists of irony, and an outright vaudevillian ad hominem slaughtering of leftist cant.  

The Barnums were stunned. They spluttered and splat, but could not regain their footing after such a dinner table assault. 'Get over it', John advised as Mary Beth and Nick fought for traction. 

‘Why did you do that?', asked John's wife Prudence hours later.  'They are lifelong friends'.  Yes indeed, but now after the trash pickups and playground stories, supernumerary at best, and the very epitome of political hothouse insularity, it was time for a change. 

 

Fighting for purchase, the hopelessly outgunned Mary Beth sputtered some inane response about 'propriety' and 'the rule of law'; but neither she nor her deer-in-the-headlights husband could possibly get their heads around the Trump revival, the absolute negation and dismissal of progressive fantasy.

'But....how...when...' and other gurgling attempts at coherence were lost in the treacly soft jazz piped in on Sonos. 

John immediately regretted the episode.  Although there was as much chance of reasonable response from the Barnums as a June Bug in December, he should have kept his own counsel, retreated, and kept still; but the time felt right.  Coming out of the closet felt good and imperative.  It was only a shame that it was the poor, clueless Barnums that had to feel the full brunt of his Trump fidelity. 

There was no point whatsoever in flogging a dead horse.  His compatriots, neighbors, co-workers, and friends had become so instinctively upset by every little thing, so incensed at America's plunge into systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia, that there was no pulling them out of the well.  There they were consigned to howl and moan while the nation moved on. 

'Nice hat', said a gym buddy still nursing his wounds after the Trump election and yet to come to grips with the Anschluss over at USAID and the mobilization at Education, HHS, and Energy.  What more could he say, confronted by the unthinkable.  He had been locker mates with Hancock for years and engaged him in small talk and pleasantries for years; but now, there he was with a MAGA hat, and insulting in-your-face slap, a rejection of all hopefulness and honesty.  

'Thanks', said Hancock, who troddled off off to the ellipticals without much of a second thought to the stares and wonder of his gym rat buddies. 

They would never get it because they did not want to - it was not that they were stupid as such, just so mired in a caressing, embracing happy intellectual provincialism that they could not even consider something other than a wonderful life in a progressive commune. 

So the faux MAGA Rappahannock Oyster Company hat stayed. Hancock, energized by the Trump Anschluss into USAID territory, lorded it over friends and neighbors.  An extra American flag flew from the Hancock balcony.  The time for quiet rectitude was over.  These jerks had a comeuppance coming, and why not from him?

There was no point whatsoever in flogging a dead horse.  His compatriots, neighbors, co-workers, and friends had become so instinctively upset by every little thing, so incensed at America's plunge into systemic racism, misogyny, and homophobia, that there was no pulling them out of the well.  There they were consigned to howl and moan while the nation moved on. 

'Nice hat', said a gym buddy still nursing his wounds after the Trump election and yet to come to grips with the Anschluss over at USAID and the mobilization at Education, HHS, and Energy.  What more could he say, confronted by the unthinkable.  He had been locker mates with Hancock for years and engaged him in small talk and pleasantries for years; but now, there he was with a MAGA hat, and insulting in-your-face slap, a rejection of all hopefulness and honesty.  

'Thanks', said Hancock, who troddled off off to the ellipticals without much of a second thought to the stares and wonder of his gym rat buddies. 

They would never get it because they did not want to - it was not that they were stupid as such, just so mired in a caressing, embracing happy intellectual provincialism that they could not even consider something other than a wonderful life in a Soviet commune. 

So the faux MAGA Rappahannock Oyster Company hat stayed. Hancock, energized by the Trump Anschluss into USAID territory, lorded it over friends and neighbors.  An extra American flag flew from the Hancock balcony.  The time for quiet rectitude was over.  These jerks had a comeuppance coming, and why not from him?

Get Over It! The Real Trump Revolution - The Arms And Tanks Of Structural Reform

Not only are liberals gone from Washington, soundly and roundly defeated by Donald Trump in November's election, but their way of thinking.  Their faux idealism, diversity window dressing, and hand-wringing righteousness are on the curb, detritus, leavings of an elite banquet. 

Everything about the last four years of the Biden Administration and the campaign of Kamala Harris was, despite their secularism and utopianism, surprisingly Christian.  Progressives were evangelists, prophets, and missionaries of a new truth, true believers in a universal, all-encompassing messianic future of harmony, peace, and verdancy.  They hectored like the prophets of the Old Testament, and shamed and cajoled new Christian waverers like Paul and his disciples.  There is only one way, said Paul and progressives, and that is ours. 

 

It was that seeping, weepy, cloying message that somehow went most against the grain.  Religious to the core, Americans had a muscular faith, one of charisma, power, and glory not one of pedestrian sanctimony; and no matter how much the Left insisted on an inclusive communitarianism, its goodness, philosophical purity, and heaven-sent beauty, most Americans outside the coastal corridors wanted none of it.

As importantly they were tired of being patronized and assumed to be ignoramuses - social troglodytes incapable of getting the picture without harping lectures and the insistent images of black people in every ad, paraded and feted at Grammy and Oscar time, on every school dais.  They were sick and tired of the hammering, the bludgeoning, and the preaching. 

Over the years Middle America saw the institutions of government infected with this brand of Utopianism - schools, public health, the military, foreign affairs, and the interior.  Every agency, every department was being transformed into a kindergarten of reformist ideals.  Citizens were told how to behave, what to believe, and what to do to assure the promised land.

Donald Trump since his first appearance on the political stage rejected all of this.  Not only did he oppose liberal policies of taxation, spending, governmental universalism, intemperate environmentalism, and an ideals-based foreign policy, but the way in which they were promoted and presented to the public - God's commandments on Mt. Arafat.  It was this self-righteous, patronizing attitude that stuck most in Trump's craw. 

The years of vilification, lawfare, tarring and feathering, the bastinado, and attempts to humiliate, denigrate, and destroy the former President were simply adding fuel to the fire, cementing his resolve, and confirming his intention to once and for all rid the country of insidious progressivism.  His would be a complete revolution, not just window dressing of a few acceptable economic and financial reforms but an uprooting of the system and very insidious philosophy which had persecuted him and eroded the originalist principles of the nation. 

 

Liberals were shocked and hysterical when within the first two weeks of his Presidency, he began the process of upheaval and structural reform.  His shuttering the offices of USAID, an agency which for decades had bled taxpayer money on idealistic schemes of social betterment and looked the other way while it was siphoned off to Aruban bank accounts, Swiss chalets, and the roulette wheels of Monte Carlo, was a long time in coming.

His associate, Elon Musk, in an uncompromising entree routed the bureaucracy, closed all doors, and took control of the purse.  No more would this agency and its army of overpaid bureaucrats, do-gooders, and teat-sucking consultants be allowed to operate. 

Foul! shouted liberals.  You can't do that.  It's illegal; but Trump knew exactly what he was doing.  A bar-fighter from the streets of New York, a take-no-prisoners, chokehold real estate mogul made of intimidation, threat, and suggestion - the currency of the business - he shouted loud and clear to progressive whiners, 'So sue me'.  

By the time the lawsuits make their way through the courts, USAID and a bevy of similar political, unproductive bureaucracies and their employees will be history. 

Democrat lawfare and the attempt to put a former President in prison on phony, trumped up charges were nothing compared to this; and he was undaunted and unbowed.  He would make good on his promises and would tear down progressive shibboleths, remake Independence and Constitution Avenues, and dig up pretentious institutions built over solid, Jeffersonian roots. 

Oh, said progressives barely over the shock of electoral defeat at the hands of a madman and gobsmacked by his executive orders, what about the poor people, the displaced bureaucrats now jobless, homeless, and destitute? but the President was unmoved.  There will always be casualties of war, and this was indeed was one. A price must be paid for years of waste, progressive idolatry, and looking-the-other-way morality. 

The hypocrisy of the Left which distorted and abused the law, the Constitution, and due process in its illegal pursuit of Donald Trump was never more clear after his takeover of USAID.  How could you? they shouted when they had been far more destructive of American principles and rules of law.

Trump's takeovers and remakes may eventually be challenged, but so what?  The man's agenda, his promises to the American people, and his profound beliefs in the very idea of structural reformation are worth the risk; and after all, the courtroom is his friend. 

Liberals are in a frenzy - their worst fears have been realized.  A tyrant, a Hitler, a Stalinist, pogrom-hunting, stalag-minded dictator is now President of the United States and rolling out his tanks and halftracks in force.

What is happening is not this hysterical nightmare but needed institutional reform and a resetting of the moral compass. This president is not given to chicanery or a limp-wristed puleeze.  He will not change the institutional architecture by dribs and drabs, rearranging the furniture but leaving rooms intact.  He will destroy and replace. 

'Get over it', Trump shouted to no one in particular from the balcony of 1700 Pennsylvania, but to all those naysayers, smarmy operatives, and faux idealists within hearing.  

Back to our roots, the President said in a calmer moment referring to Wild West prairie justice,  laissez-faire enterprise, and unbounded expansionist, territorial ambition.  Nothing stood in the way of gunslingers, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and the Union Army.  The nanny era was over, the age of commiseration, daisy chain idealism, and petticoat policy done and gone. 

'I'm back', said Trump. 'Get over it'.

Monday, February 3, 2025

DOGE And The Saturday Night Massacre - USAID And The Political Chicanery Of 'Doing Good'

'It's about time', said Carter Lane, veteran of four decades in the bush 'doing good', overseer of US government grants to African dictatorships, faulty programs whose beneficiaries, the poor, never saw a dime of American monies, and whose big men got as rich as Croesus by siphoning off most of the foreign aid to offshore bank accounts and gifting relatives and friends with the rest. 

Washington bureaucrats, enamored with Africa, Africans, and the black American diaspora, poured millions into corrupt, venal, exploitive regimes on the vain hope of improving the lot of the dispossessed and marginalized while only filling the coffers of tribal elites getting theirs. State Department planners, hungry for the continent's store of valuable energy resources and essential minerals, colluded with this idealism, lobbied Congress on national security and humanitarian grounds and assured that billions of dollars were poured down the sluice with rare conditionalities. 

The leader of a USAID mission to one African country challenged a top government official who was the liaison on all development projects, questioning his seriousness if not integrity after millions of dollars of aid were spent with little to show for it. 

The Secretary stood up, straightened his elegant linen caftan, and said, 'Mr. ____, I am here thanks to the support of my family, the loyalty of my tribe, the political support of my region, and lastly the generosity of the federal government, and I intend to repay them in that order.

 

A hard lesson for the team leader, an old progressive who had committed his life and career to bringing Africa out of the mire of misgovernance, corruption, brutality, and indifference; but an important one nevertheless.  The US government granted aid to those countries with certain geopolitical or economic interest.  In this case, the President was sitting on untold billions worth of rare earth materials necessary for cell phones and computers, and a new offshore drilling operation had discovered a deep sea oil field that beggared the imagination. 

Who in Washington cared what the country did with it paltry $10 million for health, education, and welfare as long as it voted with the US in international fora, allowed it access to its natural resources, and protected it from internal and external assault? In other words, keeping the big man in power no matter what. 

Critics have long known about the cycle of American venality and African corruption, and over a decade ago William Easterly wrote an article for the New York Review of Books entitled Foreign Aid for Scoundrels in which he criticized the international foreign assistance establishment and that of the United States in particular, for continuing to support corrupt dictators and to ignore their abuses of human and civil rights.  He referred to a seminal book by Dambisa Moyo:

Faced with this indifference to tyranny of even the most lethal kind, African intellectuals are increasingly beginning to protest. In her book Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo struck a nerve because she protested so eloquently against the paternalism, presumption, and double standards of the donor countries’ aid agencies. In many cases, foreign aid, as a review of her book put it, “fostered dependency, encouraged corruption and ultimately perpetuated poor governance and poverty.”
Paul Collier, writing in The Independent focuses on Moyo’s observation that foreign aid disenfranchises the very citizens it is designed to help:
One of her (Moyo’s) central points is that aid can, in effect, disenfranchise Africans, since the population cannot “hold its government accountable. The first stage in her argument is that aid is easy money. If governments had to rely upon private financial markets they would become accountable to lenders, and if they had to rely upon taxation they would become accountable to voters. Aid is like oil, enabling powerful elites to embezzle public revenues.
Easterly collected data on the amount and proportion of US foreign assistance to dictators:
The proportion of aid received by democracies has remained stuck at about one fifth (the rest are in a purgatory called “Partly Free” by Freedom House). As for US foreign aid, despite all the brave pronouncements such as the ones I’ve quoted, more than half the aid budget still went to dictators during the most recent five years for which figures are available (2004–2008).
Paul Biya, the dictator of Cameroon had been in power for 28 years and was known for his brutal rule.  Yet, he received over $35 billion during his reign:
In February 2008, Biya’s security forces killed one hundred people during a demonstration against food price increases and also against a constitutional amendment that will extend his rule to 2018. Many of the victims were “apparently shot in the head at point-blank range.” The IMF justification for the newest loan in June 2009 noted laconically that these “social tensions” have not recurred and “the political situation is stable”.

 

Biya is not the only dictator to have so benefitted:

Helen Epstein described the support that aid donors give to Ethiopia’s tyrant Meles Zenawi, who has roughly matched Biya in aid receipts in a shorter period of time. Peter Gill in his excellent recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (2010) documents Meles’s misdeeds further, which rise to the level of war crimes in his counterinsurgency in Ethiopia’s Somali region (I reviewed the book for The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010).
Other long-serving aid-receiving dictators include Idriss Déby in Chad ($6 billion in aid between 1990 and the present), Lansana Conté in Guinea ($11 billion between 1984 and his death in 2008), Paul Kagame in Rwanda ($10 billion between 1994 and the present), and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda ($31 billion between 1986 and the present).

 

Easterly concluded with this ringing indictment: 

Aid agencies exist to give aid, so they must keep the money flowing. The department of an aid agency assigned to help a country may not get a budget next year if its officials don’t disburse to the country’s ruler this year; so they hand out funds no matter how autocratic he is. (The autocratic recipients know this and know they can ignore any “raised concerns” about democracy, including human rights.) Only the most well-publicized and egregious violators of democratic principles—like Robert Mugabe—get cut off.

Mali was the favored child of the US State Department.  Here democracy could grow and be an example of a country which did things right, followed American principles, and had a chance to be the bulwark against the anti-democratic forces of al-Qaeda increasingly present in the vast northern desert.  Mali would vindicate State Department/USAID programs in Africa, many if not most of which had little or no impact and served to prop up tin pot dictators.  The Secretary of State could report back to a restive Congress that things were going well, the Department’s missions were succeeding, and there were many success stories that could be reported back to African-American lobbyists. 

In 2012, however, events in Mali exposed the total illusion of these assumptions. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cited Mali as a gem, a bright star of nascent democracy; but the wool had been pulled over her eyes, and in a bloody coup, her favored, knighted president was overthrown by the military exposing his endemic corruption. 

 

For decades the American government has propped up dictators and looked the other way as taxpayer dollars went down the rathole as long as African governments remained loyal.  As a result of this political indifference and feigned interest in human welfare, the continent sank farther and farther into a miasma of poverty and bullying governance. 

Of course American complicity is not the only reason why Africa is still Paleolithic.  Its tribalism and some undiscovered cultural trait which has kept it from the rapid, remarkable development of Asian countries which were at the same economic levels as Africa scarcely thirty years ago and are now international political and economic giants, are involved. 

Yet such complicity at the very least prolonged the worst of Africa's endemic underdevelopment.  US aid did little economic or social good and simply perpetuated government ineptitude and corruption. 

So, it is about time that finally and hopefully once and for all US foreign assistance is at an end.  African countries will finally be held responsible for their corruption and will be forced to borrow from European capital markets for any development loan.  The nonsense, chicanery, faux idealism, and geopolitical ignorance will end.  Elon Musk and DOGE are the avant garde.