Education and The Inner American Leader

The more we see of the American Leader's behavior, the more we understand just how awful a person he really is.  I'd hate to have the spotlight burn so intensely and relentlessly on all my words and activities (though I'd hopefully hold up to the scrutiny).  But I didn't run for Leader, and I wasn't appointed to the job by a College after I'd lost.  I call that getting "unlected." 


Part of the big reveal is in the selection of the Leader's "Moron Cabinet."  Each selection serves to highlight a different personal failure of the Orangutan Executive. 


Since Betsy DeVos - possibly the least capable person ever to be a Secretary in any department, ever, is about to unveil her (and American Leader's) big Education plan, let's start there.  What does education mean to the billionaire heiress and her primitive boss?


Leader went to Wharton for an undergraduate education.  Wharton does a few things for the Leader.  First, it's a "name" school - graduates have a certain cachet on the market (at least they did before Leader).  So an education can give you name recognition.  What else?  Well, Leader can claim that he graduated first in his class.  Records from all the way back then aren't digitized so you can't Google it.  And the school, helpfully, won't confirm anything but the fact of graduation.  The Daily Pennsylvanian puts it on record as a lie.  He wasn't even on the 56-name Dean's List.   


Go journalism!


The school is and was expensive, so there is very limited elbow-rubbing with the Hoi Polloi - that's a feature.  No use going to a school with a bunch of losers who won't grow up to be bankers you can sucker on Real Estate deals. 


School was about raising your profile and making cash connections for the future, and likely sexual liaisons of some kind.  But that's it. 
Judging from all his words and actions in the time he's been under the closest scrutiny, this is a profoundly ignorant man.  Not (necessarily) stupid.  But intellectually uncurious to an astounding degree.  He reminds us daily - hourly - of his lack not only of knowledge but of insight.  A man with a two-minute attention span will never get to the heart of anything.


Which brings us back to the cold reality of Education Secretary Heiress DeVos.  Her plan for all of America is to make American education fit the Leader's paradigm.


So here it is.  Knowledge is worthless for its own sake, so there's no great need to provide it to the unwashed,  Libtards like to stomp around about how the Poors need learning but for what?  Why does my future janitor need to study algebra?  Why does my future limo driver need to read Shakespeare?  The future minimum-wage cashiers don't even need to add and subtract figures - the register does that for them. 


If education has no value in itself, its value can only be found in it's cash flow.  Expensive schools weed out the scum and turn a nice profit.  Why not take the profit from lazy gubmint teachers and give it to Deserving corporations? 


Education has no value outside of its monetary value.  So why is it still free to freeloaders?  Everybody can get education now - and you can't even segregate the schools since the 'good old days.'  So Deserving rich kids have to go to school with Undeserving greedy 'Taker' kids (sometimes).  Hell - they even feed the poor kids!   


Heiress Betsy has a solution for all that:  vouchers.  With a voucher system, the Deserving rich can top up their vouchers with lovely piles of their own cash and get their Over-Deserving Unicorn kids into the expensive private schools which they double deserve because of their wise choice of parents.


Meanwhile, the Poors can send their kids to schools that will take basic (free!) voucher money.  And they'll keep costs down by not paying teachers and having no libraries and holding school in a strip mal or (better) church.  And since the vouchers will only pay a nickel on today's education dollar, there's Small Gubmint! 


The next logical step is to slash university funding and raise the costs and debt collections of student loans.  That's clearly a win-win.  That way, if an Undeserving Poor manages to get a
degree, the Deserving banks can still milk them for decades. 


She's going to propose pay-for-play at all levels of education.  No knowledge anymore.  No social or economic mobility.  Just like the leader wants it.


My only question about this dementia is:  where does it come from?  What poor kids pissed in Heiress Betsy's corn flakes 50 years ago?  She's been spending millions of her inherited wealth to press for a voucher system to take educational opportunity away from poor and middle-class people  for years.  And she admits that she bought her current gig with those expenditures. 


Why?  Why is she so desperate to hurt less fortunate kids (in her case that's pretty much all of them)?  I guess you could ask that about all the appointees - and the Repubs in Congress.  Why are they so passionate about hurting people?


At this point I just hope I never really get it.  I'd hate to be cruel enough to even understand their cruelty.

Good Riddance: Roger Ailes (1940-2017)

Roger Ailes is dead.  [Spit].  Good. 


Ailes ruined America to the greatest possible extent that he could.  If he could ruin it more, he would have.  Gladly. 


The longtime fascist hatchet man for Nixon and Reagan and H.W. Bush was one of the people who saw the opening when Reagan had the Fairness Doctrine removed.  That doctrine had been in place since the dawn of television (1949).  It "required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was — in the Commission's view — honest, equitable, and balanced." 


Screw that, right?  If people hear both sides of the story, they will never choose the fascist side.  Having that doctrine in place forced even the scummiest of right wing blackhearts to try to seem rational.  Not any more.


Ailes built Fox News to tell right wing lies on a 24-/7/365 basis.  He polluted the American voting public with a perspective that was pure greed and hate.  He made the American spirit smaller, meaner, uglier, and more violent.  He made people believe that immigrants were sub-human.  He got disaffected whites to vote for garbage like the Current Leader - totally against their actual interest.


His professional liars pushed stories that made their viewers believe total unabashed falsehoods.  Viewers who were raised during the Fairness Doctrine era were defenseless against Ailes' army of charlatans.  Of course you believed what the News Anchor said.  Why wouldn't you?  Utter scumbag Brit Hume sounded like Walter Cronkite.  The only difference is that Cronkite never knowingly lied, and Hume never knowingly told the truth. 


Because American political discourse had always been a 'he-said-she-said' proposition, that's how news continued to be reported.  But one side started to be convenient fiction devoid of actual facts.  The Fox News version became complete constant fiction of the most perverse sort. 


The entire economics story of every Fox News liar has always been 'tax cuts for the wealthy will solve everything.'  It's an economic theory that has proven wrong everywhere it has been tried.  It doesn't work in fact and it doesn't work in theory.  But no matter what the problem - literally - tax cuts for the rich are the answer according to the far right mythology that Ailes pimped.  It applied are the same snake oil remedy for deficits as for surpluses.  When W. Bush showed up, he had Clinton budget surpluses to use - so he handed the money to the rich in tax cuts.  On his way to tanking the world economy, the budget deficits W. rang up had only one solution:  tax cuts for the rich. 


One of the most damnable things Ailes did was to order poor whites to reject Obamacare.  Akthough it's hard to choose a nadir for the author of the Willie Horton ad.  People who desperately needed the health care that the ACA provides were lied to over and over and over again for most of a decade - and even longer, to Bill Clinton's abortive efforts to provide a health care.  Even as the ACA worked - and continues to work - the falsehood machine told people it was failing and stealing their money and precious bodily fluids.  . 



Can you imagine driving people who need health care - people who will die early and painfully without it - to oppose their own salvation?  And doing it to preserve the profits of the greed-machine private health care firms?  What sort of monster would do such a thing?


Roger Ailes.  His legacy is an American voting public who can no longer act as responsible citizens.  Americans are now willing to embrace any crazy Nazi fascist racist crap that's shoved at them. 


I'm convinced that the American Leader is a nihilist.  I don't think he believes in anything at all.  And because his nihilism is equaled only by his narcissism he has put America in a constant cycle of crisis since the day he lost the presidential election.  But he's only there because of Ailes.


Congress can thank Ailes for their Gerrymandered majorities.  Those majorities are inept and unable to govern - because they're still using Ailes playbook:  lie.  Lie all the time and people will fall into line eventually.  But when elected politicians try to fulfill promises that were always counter to provable reality, the whole system fails.


That's what we're seeing today.  The system is crumbling because every federal leader has been put in place by telling demonstrable falsehoods and cheating on elections. 


They can't do tax cuts and deficit reduction at the same time.  No matter how many times they promise it, it's never going to be true.  If Speaker Ryan can pass his draconian joke of a budget, the deficit will explode because he gave it all away to the rich. 


Try this experiment:  take all the money you can get your hands on - cash in your retirement savings and take a second and third mortgage out on your house.   Okay?  Good.  Now give it away to rich people.  That's a Ryan budget.  And when you can't pay your bills or feed your kids, it's because you are irresponsible. 
He created an ocean of fear.  The message was always the same - be afraid.  Fear your African-American neighbors.  Fear the Muslim world.  Fear anyone not in our tribe.  Fear is a great motivator.  After 9-11, fear became the currency of American politics, stoked by Fox and the rest of the extreme right.
None of that ever brought him down.  It was the sexual harassment he promoted and committed in his organization that finally forced him out.  But not before he had warped the voting public into a group that would vote for a man caught on tape bragging about his sexual assaults and misogyny. 


People believe that stuff and vote for shitheads like Ryan and Leader because of Ailes. 


Fuck him. 

Why the Civil War?

Why did the American States have to fight the Civil War back in the Olden Days, and why didn't Andrew Jackson stop it?  These are the questions nobody wants to ask.  The American Leader is right - as always - to 'go there' and get to the heart of the controversy that nobody talks about.


Actually, Leader is just really bad at using his dog whistle.  Because only the dogs are supposed to be able to hear it.  And we all heard it, right?  The American Leader was telling the American Followers that the Civil War could have been WINK! avoided. 


And how could a savvy negotiator like the Leader of America have intervened to stop the Civil War?  The negotiation would have involved agreeing to WINK!  "States Rights."  WINK! 


That's "States Rights" in the sense that the States have the Right to own human beings.  And their White guys have the right to own people of a different shading scheme. 


Slavery.  It's called Slavery.  Say the word.  And the South depended on it completely.  And they were never going to give it up no matter what.  Unless forced to do so, by a, like, a war. 


The only "too bad" part of the Civil War was that the scumbag slave owners couldn't see that it had to stop.  These were terrible people who could not function without slaves to do their work.  So they held a massive war and doggedly defended their 'right' to be bottom-feeding sewer-hole slave-owning hell-destined people.  Now their direct descendants - in thought if not in genetics - are the Leader Followers. 


And to the Leader Followers the whole Civil War thing was just a bunch of Good Ole Boys marching around whipping Yankee ass - until they had to stop because they were a lost cause.  And then it was Evil Yankee Carpetbaggers ruining the Way of Life.  And on and on until poor Jim Crow got strung up on his own favorite hang'in tree by LBJ, and then all they had left was the statues and street names. 


And soon they won't even have those (not soon enough). 


So they all understand their Leader when he laments the Civil War.  Maybe that's the real meaning of MAGA.  Maybe it's the 1850's they want to go back to and not the 1950's. 


Again, a dog whistle is supposed to be a message from the Leader that only the Followers understand.  The Repubs have been doing that for decades, talking about 'entitlements' and meaning 'the welfare that Black people get from the rest of us.'  They talked 'entitlement reform' to tell their voters that they're going to slash money that people need to live on.  And just because that would mean cutting more from the White voters than anyone else - well that's just the price we pay for continuing a 400-year race war.  Well worth it amIright?


The question remains how much of the Leader's Twooting is good old American dumbness and how much was it a message to the Followers?  Because the dumbness goes very deep in this one.  Clearly, the Leader had no idea that questioning the necessity of the Civil War was well-trodden ground.  It was so well understood that when the dog whistle was blown it sounded like a trumpet. 


The question of idiocy includes publically talking about Andrew Jackson's reaction to the terrible war, Jackson having died 16 years prior to hostilities.  That means Leader didn't know before he started talking that he would stumble - and I do mean stumble - onto this topic.  He didn't know so he didn't ask the internet whether Jackson had any thoughts on the war - or that it took place more than a decade and a half after Old Hickory's demise. 


So Leader remembered that Followers like the Confederacy, so he should throw some lament in there.  But he didn't apprehend enough about things that happened in the past to align that lament with things that actually did happen.


That's part of being the Buffoon in Charge for so long.  He must have told his Jackson stories for years when fellow racists got together at parties.  And they were as dumb or - unlikely though it may be - dumber than him.  Nobody said anything because either they didn't know history or knew the lout they were listening to and kept quiet. 


And that's all part of Truthlessness too.  There is no such think as objective verifiable Truth, so whatever I say is equal to whatever you say because everything anybody says is equally True.  So pointy-headed science and history types need to just zip it. 


In a Truthless world, the only thing that matters is power.  Economic power is the best - you can tell people they're "Fired!"  You can buy and sell things and decide to rip people off.  If you have economic power you can legally steal by not paying for things you receive.  Hey!  Sue me!


Celebrity power is great because you can abuse and assault women and guys just laugh.  You're well-known so you're treated like royalty even if you don't even have a billion dollars.  You can walk into teenage girls dressing rooms because you're famous - or was that because you're rich?  Hard to keep it straight. 


But political power is a little different.  Unlike the other two types, political power requires a modicum of consent.  Enough other people have to agree with what you want to do political things.  When the American Leader won the College of Electors, he though that was it.  Not so much.  Because other politicians - not all of them celebrities or billionaires - won other elections.  And the Leader needs to have them want what he wants, and stull have the Followers at home want the same things. 


Nobody knew it was going to be this complicated. 


The Followers want lots of Civil War talk and they respond to DOG WHISTLES.  But Paul Ryan can't seem to get anything done in the House.  I mean, just because he's never gotten anything done in the House is no reason to think stuff wouldn't get done.  Truthlessly.  And the rich people just want him to give back all their money from the Poors, but then the Freedom people won't go into massive debt for the deserving wealthy.  And the Senate needs to stop needing 60 votes like they have ever since history.  Mitch cheated to get the stolen Supreme Court spot filled.  Why can't he just keep cheating?


Obviously, this is all the Democrats fault. 


Let's hope Barron gets assigned a book report on the Red Badge of Courage or something so we can get this sorted out.