CSotD: When Chaos Starts Looking Like KAOS
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I give Chip Bok so much grief so often that, when I do agree with him, it’s only fair that I say so and give him the lead-off spot. And I agree with his summation of our foreign policy, at least in its outcome if not its conscious intention.
At this stage, I’m not sure if any of Dear Leader’s policies include conscious intentions. In my days as a business writer, I dealt with a lot of balloon-juice merchants who always had some fabulous project in mind that couldn’t possibly happen.
There was the guy who gave a presentation to 100 or so Realtors about a new development he was going to build with very wide streets so that the Shuttle could use it as a back-up landing site. We each got an expensive folder with a die-cut cover behind which was a full-color illustration of the Shuttle landing on his street, or on what would have been his street if he’d ever gotten a shovel into the ground.
And as marketing director at a TV station, I devised a system to coordinate between ad sales and production to cut down on misunderstandings and re-shooting of commercials. I gave a copy to the station manager who approved it for distribution until about a week later when somebody complained.
Then he read it for the first time and chewed me out.
So it doesn’t surprise me that a snake-oil peddler like Donald Trump has gone bankrupt multiple times as foolish, ill-planned projects blew up in his face, and it seems perfectly logical that his eager, ignorant management chaos is more like KAOS from Get Smart.
Except that Get Smart was a comedy and the nitwits there couldn’t actually starve children or blow up the planet, which makes KAOS funny but chaos not so much.
The fault is not that Trump shoots his mouth off without thinking or that, like my old station manager, he doesn’t bother to examine ideas before approving them. Michael Ramirez points to the problem, which is that the Republican Party has decided to agree to whatever harebrained nonsense he puts forth, confirming totally unqualified and dangerous cabinet members and endorsing horrifyingly ill-considered policies.
Trump’s collaborators cheerfully pass along his notions as if they truly believed that George Soros burned down the Reichstag, which they would if Dear Leader promoted the notion.
Case in point:
Juxtaposition of the Day
This sudden attack on the waste and disorganization of USAID raises an important question: Says who?
A look at Google News turns up a long list of far-right publications and commentators all of whom agree that USAID is horrible and wasteful and corrupt and appallingly fair to women and minorities and gay people, though some of the examples they cite turn out to be from other agencies, or completely idiotic things like claiming that we sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza.
Which we didn’t, but that doesn’t stop anyone from claiming that Hamas uses them to make balloons to float explosives into Israel. Not that they then tell us why Hamas doesn’t use regular, larger, actual balloons or where Hamas is finding helium or hydrogen or … well, you get it.
It’s a stupid, stupid rumor, but these are people who think secret agents have telephones in their shoes and that you can amend the Constitution with an executive order. Well, maybe not the part about the shoes, but they believe the stuff about condoms and executive orders.
As for the waste, Forbes — which is hardly perched on the right fringe but certainly isn’t leftist, either — explains the crowd rush to attack USAID, while over in Ireland, Martyn Turner provides a look at how people in other countries see the kerfuffle.
Most of what USAID does has two aims: One is to help people in different countries and the other is make them like us. Neither of these are apparent goals of the new administration, and so we’re not interested in feeding the hungry or helping to wipe out malaria and other diseases, the latter goal being in conflict with our domestic health priorities as well.
The major goal, Pedro X. Molina points out, is to make Dear Leader look like a tough guy without him actually risking a punch in the nose.
Though it’s only fair to note that, in addition to picking on little brown children, Dear Leader does things like ordering a rescue mission to the Space Station that was planned before he even took office, and his get-tough thing with Colombia was not because they wouldn’t accept returned refugees. They had been accepting them on commercial flights but objected to military planes landing in their airport.
So would Elon’s waste patrol, if it bothered to compare the costs and actually cared about government spending rather than chest-beating displays of power.
As for undocumented workers, Marty Two Bulls points out that there are plenty of white folks who could be rounded up if the government were actually opposed to illegal immigration rather than immigration of people from “shit hole countries,” as Dear Leader so eloquently explained it.
Which also explains why brown people who were following the law and attempting to legally enter the US had their applications cut off.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
As Alcaraz notes, native people here are finding themselves being questioned by ICE and having the IDs establishing their tribal membership questioned by people whose forbears arrived in what to Indians counts as recent times.
And I don’t mean that sarcastically or in metaphorical terms. Unless you’ve sat down and talked history with an Indian, you have no concept of how far back their calendars go and how personally they take the events of the past three or four hundred years.
Jones brings up an existing parallel in how Indians were treated and Gazans are being treated. In 1974, members of the American Indian Movement traveled to the Middle East to meet with the PLO and share their sense of displacement and unfair treatment.
If the rest of us missed the commonality, they certainly didn’t.
But then they weren’t trying to.
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