Elton John has gone on a media tour, and in recalling his past drug use, he has said that it was a bad idea for countries to decriminalize marijuana. Now from a libertarian or even harm reduction standpoint, I’m inclined to disagree. But we’ve been getting a lot of evidence of how dangerous it is for important people to make important decisions while chronically altered.
At 5:58 pm December 20, the Republican House of Representatives managed to pass a two-thirds vote to continue funding the government, which heads to the Democratic Senate. An agreement that had previously been made between the parties got torched by President-inept Donald Trump, or more accurately, by his main advisor, Elon Musk.
Side note: an old friend, Jason Tondro, the same Jason Tondro who had worked for Paizo and is currently working for Wizards of the Coast/Dungeons & Dragons and recently attracted controversy by saying he doesn’t care what old gamers think about the ‘woke’ direction of his company, posted recently on Facebook that he came up with a new word, ‘Xit’ to describe what used to be a ‘tweet’ before Musk changed Twitter into X. ‘Xit’ is meant to be pronounced ‘shit’.
Anyway, this week Musk Xitted that the government should not only throw out the spending bill, but not pass any spending until Trump’s coronation on January 20th. In other words, a whole month, during which government workers would have no salary through Christmas and the civilians who depend on them would have few if any services. The fact that Musk got House Speaker Moscow Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) to go along with this has caused a large number of people to refer to Musk – perhaps jokingly – as the president-elect.
This is not a new observation. Ever since The Election, Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the remaining reasons to watch MSDNC, has pointed out that Musk’s influence on our President-inept makes him the acting President for the new government with Trump as Vice President at best, especially since JD Vance is that much less in the spotlight now than he was as a Senator. Recently O’Donnell pointed out that Musk openly uses drugs and has violated the federal security rules regarding federal contractors, which applied to Musk because of Space X’s work for the government.
But then, the lesson of the first Trump term was that all the laws and all the safeguards our government has to protect against corruption are meaningless if they’re not going to be enforced. And the lesson of this election is that nobody wants to enforce them.
Because America wanted celebrities. They wanted reality TV. They wanted the government to be run like a business. Well, now we once again have a celebrity coming to the White House who got his reputation from playing a billionaire on TV, while his eminence grise is an actual billionaire who’s going to run this country just like he runs Twitter. Into the ground.
Specifically by expecting all the staff to work harder with fewer resources and personnel, and calling the result “efficiency”, and by giving a platform to crank theorists, neo-Nazis and Putin sympathizers, to the extent that they are not all the same group.
Why? Because everybody in the Trump Party, possibly including Trump, knows that Trump is a pudding brain who at this point in his life is just a greasy, unnatural, artificially colored amalgamation of pork. Like the McRib. Except we don’t have to listen to the McRib ramble for 2 hours about how everything it doesn’t like is socialist. So you have Elon Musk, who certainly has more direction than Trump himself even if he might actually be more addled by chemicals. So we have what are ostensibly Trump ideas like “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) to be co-headed by Musk and fellow suckup Vivek Ramaswamy. Because nothing says efficiency like creating a whole new bureaucratic office and then appointing two men to run it.
And all of that is because Musk knows his target better than all the other suckups and having more money and influence than the others is in best position to appeal to him. Also this week, Musk apparently crashed a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump was hosting suckup-in-training Jeff “Democracy Dies In Darkness, And I Should Know” Bezos. Journalist Seth Abramson reacted: “What it also confirms is that Musk not only has no boundaries and believes himself Trump’s superior but has no intention of permitting any other plutocrat to squeeze more juice out of Trump than him. Showing up at that dinner uninvited is a power play intended to cow both other oligarchs and Trump.” This from an article that concluded: “One person was happy with the night, and in the end it’s likely the only one Musk cared about. Trump woke up the morning after the crashed dinner and took to his Truth Social account exclaiming: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”
Because Trump really is a little kid who still needs to be reassured that he is the most important person in the world, even after the public has twice confirmed that he is. And heaven forbid anything should threaten that self perception. This month Trump successfully bullied ABC News into bribing him with a $15 million contribution to his presidential library (I had no idea HUSTLER had so many back issues) because anchor George Stephanopoulos said he was guilty of rape in the E. Jean Carroll civil case (a legal technicality more than a slander) and not only that, he wants to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for a pre-election poll that showed Harris leading slightly in Iowa where Trump ultimately won by a safe margin.
I have never seen a more sore winner in my life.
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, Trump. Can you just let reality WIN, for once? Can you not pitch a fit because you can’t make the sun rise in the west? Can you not sue the H.L. Mencken estate for him predicting that one day America would elect a downright moron? You’re gonna be president again. Despite all the “experts” telling America why that would be a horrible idea. You defied all the odds.
You got everything you wanted. No one can touch you.
You’re Superman now.
So go and jump out of a window, Donnie.
Everyone wants to see you fly.