Doom Report (Week 4: Mad as a Hatter? No, Madder ...)

When I was very young and just starting my first job, I was really confused when people would bitch about how much the government “took out” of their paychecks.  This was a common complaint, but I just didn’t get it at all.

See, I understood almost immediately that, while there may be two numbers on your paycheck—gross pay and net pay—only one of them is real.  One of them is just an imaginary number.  It’s not like you received the bigger amount and then someone took some back.  You never got that in the first place.  The smaller number is how much the company paid out, and it’s how much you received.  The other number?  Never happened.  Doesn’t exist.  Totally irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter.

And I bring this up because I wish I could sit down all the reporters and pundits in America right now and make them stop asking questions to which the answer doesn’t matter.  Here are a few examples of questions that people that I normally respect a great deal keep asking, and which make me want to punch them in the face.

“What can Congress do about all this?”

It doesn’t matter.  Congress won’t do anything, so it doesn’t matter what they can do.  What’s possible in some sort of alternate reality has no bearing on the one we’re currently living through.

“What do you think Republicans would say if George Soros did what Musk is doing / Biden had done what Trump is doing?”

It doesn’t matter.  We live in a post-irony reality.  Republicans have no problem saying something is unacceptable today and then doing it themselves tomorrow.  They assume no one will notice, and wouldn’t care if they did.  Remember when Lindsey Graham said “Use my words against me”? and then went barreling ahead with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination anyhow?  Sure, it might be nice if Republicans had any shame left.  They don’t.  Move on.

“Can I get your reaction to this latest thing the Trump regime is doing?”

Unless you’re talking to Jasmine Crockett, whose reaction might at least be entertaining, it doesn’t matter.  Hakeem Jeffries and Jamie Raskin and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are lovely, articulate people who have intelligent platforms and, hopefully, still have a number of important contributions to make.  Their reacions, however, can’t do any more than make us feel that our outrage is righteous, and, I gotta tell ya: we’re rapidly getting to the point where even that is wearing thin.

So I’m getting tired of hearing this left-wing punditry version of mental masturbation.  Let’s talk about what we can actually do for a change.

Except for Robert Garcia.  He can react however he likes.  Also, I don’t generally agree with Brian Tyler Cohen’s rails against traditional media, but when CNN anchors are asking Garcia to defend his word choice rather than about the substance of his speech, I have to concede BTC might be onto something.

This week, President Musk assured us that, if he does anything sus, he will post about it on the social media platform that he owns.  This, apparently, makes his department (or non-department, as the case may be) the most transparent one that’s ever been.  “Maximally transparent,” assures Pres. Musk, adding “I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent.”

Good thing too, because every department President Musk wants to shut down is, coincidentally, investigating him: the FAA, the CFPB, the NLRB, the NHTSA, even USAID, which I didn’t even know could investigate people.  But thank goodness Musk will expose his conflicts of interest in his tweets.  One of those “transparent” tweets? CFPB RIP (I suppose the “Hellooo X Money!” part was implied.)  Well, I say “every department,” but in the case of the Dept of Education, it’s probably less about being investigated and more, as I mentioned last week, about creating a permanent underclass.  Still, I don’t think we need to worry too much: it’s not like he has six companies all receiving money from the federal government or anything.  Happily, any government employees cut illegally by President Musk can sue.  Well, assuming they can afford good lawyers; as Jamie Raskin told BTC, the Department of Justice certainly won’t be defending them.

What else?  Well, new Defense secretary Pete Hegseth had to get an emergency paint job for his house.  Still, that was only $50 thousand dollars; not nearly enough for President Musk to investigate as waste, fraud, or abuse.  And RFK Jr. was confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, so brain worms finally have the government representation they’ve been fighting for.

Robert Garcia, at least, gives me hope that maybe the Democrats are waking up to the understanding that they can’t play nice any more.  And, maybe (and more importantly), to the idea that they need to actually listen to people’s issues rather than just talking at them about how awesome they had it under Biden.  As Ash Sarkar, a British journalist and activist, pointed out on this week’s Pod Save the UK,

... if you are in America, you have very good reasons to mistrust the FDA, to mistrust the healthcare establishment; you’ve got very good reasons to mistrust these people, and and I think that unless you understand that people are right to be angry—they are completely right to be angry, and they are right to loathe these institutions—I don’t think you can get anywhere.

Trust the Brits to understand our situation better than we do.  I think it’s because they hit it first: that people would vote for something as disastrous as Brexit seemed incomprehensible to us Americans, but I think grappling with that reality over the past several years has given the British the capacity to completely understand why Americans re-elected Trump.  They just wanted to see something—anything!—change.  Once the Democrats truly get that, they might be useful again.  Not holding my breath, of course, but one can hope.

Also note that Ash said that RFK Jr. was “obviously mad as a wasp sandwich,” which is absolutely the most brilliant assessment of our new director of HHS that I’ve ever heard.  Can’t think of a better simile for our times than that.