No “Mistake”

Don’t let them bamboozle you; the destruction of the government is on purpose

There are sooooo many things that are fucked up now, sometimes it seems fruitless to point out any specific thing; it’s like you’re dying in a hail of gunfire like Bonnie and Clyde and picking out individual bullets and going NOW, SEE, THIS HERE, THIS IS THE SORT OF THING I’M TALKING ABOUT.

So if you don’t want to hear about this one, feel free to skip. In fact, go ahead and stop reading this newsletter, or any newsletter, or paying attention to politics at all, move to a tiny tropical island, create the next Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax, get rich, have a mansion built with a glass-front view of the beach, kick back and watch the rest of us get blown to pieces in the coming Fentanyl Wars. Really, I’d be happy for you!

Anyway: We’re all well versed in all the wreckage Trump and the phony agency DOGE have been doing in believe-it-or-not less than two months. WIRED has been doing great, widely-lauded, subscribed-to-by-me coverage of their “digital coup,” showing how Elon Musk’s underage creeps muscled their way into multiple government agencies and started — oh, let’s pick one of the better-known metaphors — ripping out the wiring from offices that perform taxpayer services, pay for taxpayer medical treatment, develop life-saving drugs, keep planes in the air, etc.

The alleged purpose of this smash-and-gut is to eliminate government “waste, fraud, and abuse” — which was actually the purpose of many federal officials before the DOGE kids were even born, including the Inspectors General, 17 of whom this administration fired shortly after taking office.

As the New York Times, among others, has shown, though Musk and DOGE claim to have saved hundreds of billions of dollars by randomly switching off main breakers and screaming YOU ARE NO LONGER NEEDED, WOMAN WHO KNOWS HOW EVERYTHING WORKS, WE ARE REPLACING YOU WITH A PLASTIC BOX THAT HUMS MENACINGLY, they aren’t really saving much of anything. In fact their rampage is more likely to have cost taxpayers’ money, and done severe, lasting damage to the services upon which they (we) rely.

In the words of Walter Sobchak, these men are nihilists (as well as subscribers to the tenets of National Socialism). Their purpose was never to make government more efficient. Their purpose was to take a bunch of ketamine and fuck things up. That’s all they know how to do.

But those of us who have been following American conservatism for a while see what’s behind it: the other, less drug- and ego-depraved Trump factota turned these freaks loose upon the government, and are now following up by sending propagandists out to explain to MAGA rubes that the ensuing fucked-upness is proof of waste, fraud, and abuse. Once the fraud got put over, the mission is to shovel-pass contracts for the work of the ruined departments to their con-man cronies, who will charge an enormous amount to do a shittier version of the work once handled by dedicated public servants. In other words, rightwing business as usual.

But this phase of the caper has hit a snag. Clearly they expected their vandalism to be less well-covered than it has been, or at least that they would be able to manage the pushback to it better than they have.

I’m aware that smart people such as ourselves read more news and are generally more aware of what’s going on than the Common Clay of the New West, but it appears, from the wrath expressed at Republican town halls and from poll results, that people are starting to see the connection between kids with names like Big Balls ho-dadding through government offices and grandpa not getting a timely appointment at the VA.

A perhaps better indicator of this trend is Republicans trying to get out from under it. The way they’re doing it, though, is super cheesy and THAT’s what bugs me.

Take this bit from a recent JD Vance interview:

Vice President JD Vance admitted that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while carrying out his mass firings of government employees under the Department of Government Efficiency.

“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake,” Vance told NBC News on Friday. “I’m accepting of mistakes.”

“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes,” he added, acknowledging that “there are a lot of good people who work in the government—a lot of people who are doing a very good job.”

Vance did not specify what exactly those mistakes were or how they had been corrected.

Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes were made! What they really wanted to do is get the bad people who are not doing a very good job:

“I think some people clearly are collecting a check and not doing a job,” he told NBC. “Now, how many people is that? I don’t know, in a 3 million-strong federal workforce, whether it’s a few thousand or much larger than that.”

How could be possibly know? The only way to find out is to pulverize a few more load-bearing walls.

Now, I think we have established that what Musk and the DOGE crew were on was not a mission, but a rampage. When one is on a rampage, one does not make mistakes, because one has no definite aim beyond mayhem — you can’t say “that sledgehammer blow to a support beam was a mistake, in a way that me driving this Jeep through a plate glass window was not.” As I said, they were sent in there to fuck shit up.

Yet the message that DOGE was doing sound work but made “mistakes” has been sent out into the world as a winsome way of disowning responsibility for the wreckage — we were trying to do something good, see, but we made mistakes and now it takes a month for the Social Security Administration to investigate your lost payments. You understand, right? Hope you have some money saved!

Thus, too, we have the Wall Street Journal telling us about “The Collateral Damage of Trump’s Firing Spree.” It’s “collateral damage” because the DOGE squad was engaged in a real, valid, for-the-people crusade to attack those losers “collecting a check and not doing a job” – you know, wastefraudandabuse! But somehow they lost control of their maces and machine guns and took out a few innocent people, OK maybe more than a few people, and OK maybe the rampage “has worsened services Americans receive and hindered remaining staff working on areas like improving healthcare and lowering energy bills… [and] discouraged top talent from working for the federal government,” and the resulting staff cuts “have reduced or slowed services for health, education and even operations like weather forecasting”…

But ya gotta admit their intentions were good! Maybe somebody took the afternoon off and didn’t report it! What if we didn’t find that? Which we didn’t. But just be patient and the next wave of wanton destruction will certainly pick some of these wastrels up — and meantime please don’t mind the collateral damage.

There are some sadder usages, too. “Trump once hailed WWII vet Medgar Evers as a ‘great American hero,’” reads the headline at Mississippi Today. “Now the U.S. Army has erased him from a section on the Arlington National Cemetery website.” (As you may know, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete “Glug Glug” Hegseth and other Trumpkins have been stripping records of minority achievement from government sites as fast as they can.)

Mississippi Today talks about this obviously racist act to 83-year-old Reuben Anderson, who served as a Mississippi Supreme Court Justice in the late 80s, and “gave Trump a 2017 tour of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.” Anderson, Mississippi Today says, “can’t imagine the president would want Evers removed. ‘That’s got to be a mistake,’ he said.”

I barely have the heart to tell him. But I will tell you: It’s no mistake, and the worse the result, the more they meant it.