Thursday, January 05, 2023

The Clown Show You Ordered

This was on Twitter this morning (originally from the Washington Post, I think?) and I could not agree more:


The entire schtick for the GOP since the age of Reagan was that government didn't work and couldn't work. The worst thing you could hear, claimed Reagan, was "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." (Though I will note that this does not stop reactionary voters or Red States from gobbling down all the government help they can get.)

That's their mantra -- government can't work, government shouldn't work, anything the government is involved in fails. It's their excuse for destroying public schools, refusing to allow nationalized healthcare, underfunding state universities and public transport, and selling our national defense to companies like Haliburton. Government can't work. Only capitalism works. (And no matter the disasters it perpetuates, capitalism can never fail; it can only be failed. That's how you know it's a religion and not an economic system.)

So with that as their life goal -- proving that government doesn't work -- how can we be surprised when members of the GOP get elected to government and set about making sure it doesn't work?

Stir in their faithful adherence to anti-intellectualism (which is why many of them voted for Trump, specifically because he knew nothing about how to run a government), and voila! Today's Republican clown show.

It would be hilarious if they weren't taking us down with them.

ETA: Democracy: Where the people get the government they deserve. We could have had a governor with a PhD in physics, but an educated black man terrifies people in Arkansas, so they voted for a Trump Mini-me.





2 comments:

D Shannon said...

How come the people who claim government is evil always take the side of the government when a police officer shoots someone?

delagar said...

And, of course, when the police shoot one of them, it's an entirely different story. (See: Ashley Babbitt.)