I don't know how Arizona's Democratic senator Mark Kelly, got my phone number, but a text message from him landed the other day with a deaf noise.
“Elon Musk came after me again,” said the text. Of course, I knew it was a stratagema for cash, but I was intrigued.
It turns out that the impetuous billionaire had insulted Kelly for free after the senator had published a long thread in X on his recent trip to Ukraine.
“What I saw showed me that we cannot give up the Ukrainian people,” Kelly wrote. “Everyone wants this war to end, but any agreement has to protect the security of Ukraine and cannot be a gift for Putin.”
Musk reaction: “You are a traitor.”
Let that sink, to quote Musk himself.
Kelly is an American patriot. It flew 39 combat missions as the US Navy pilot. During the desert storm operation. Later, as NASA astronaut, he twice ordered the space ferry.
The musk, on the contrary, left South Africa at age 17 partly to avoid mandatory military service.
His childish insult recalled the infamous comment that the then presidential candidate Donald Trump made in 2016 about Republican senator John McCain, also from Arizona, a navy pilot who spent more than five years as a war prisoner in Vietnam.
“He is a war hero because he was captured,” said Trump, who crouched the Vietnam draft by stating that he had bone spur. “I like people who were not captured.”
I don't know what billionaire is less suitable for exercising power in a democracy, musk or Trump. Neither of them has a laminate of empathy, an indispensable feature in a great leader.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Musk told Podcast Joe Rogan last month. “So we have an ongoing civilization empathy.”
Recently, Musk published a denigrating meme American who receive federal benefits such as “the kind of parasites.” This of someone whose empire, including Tesla and Space X, was built with billions of dollars in government funds, that is, their tax dollars.
Musk's icy attitude towards his humans helps to explain why he can sleep at night while denying the food and medicine that saves lives to people in the many non -developed countries that used to be helped by the United States agency for international development, the first of the programs he has been trying to be coming out of existence.
The trump and Musk cutting and burning approach to the government, with the economy, with relations with traditional allies, and the way in which they have reduced the White House to a Tesla concessionaire demonstrate their lack of concern for the US people. (Have you reviewed your balance 401 (K) lately?)
But most importantly, their actions show that they are not really interested in an efficient government, Musk's putative reason became essentially the co -president.
It is difficult to monitor all the demands that have presented themselves accusing the couple of illegally government agencies and programs. His method is pure madness.
Take your plan to reduce by half of the workforce of the Internal Revenue Service. According to Washington Post, Natasha Sarin, professor at Yale's Law Faculty who served as deputy undersecretary of economic policy in the Biden administration, the dismissals of the IRS at the promised scale “very conservative would lead to an increase of $ 400 billion in non -recurring taxes during the next decade. It could easily mean more than $ 2 billion in losses.”
On Thursday, federal judges in California and Maryland ruled that thousands of federal workers in 19 agencies had been illegally fired and ordered their reinstatement. Thanks to the so -called government efficiency department, a name George Orwell would have been proud to dream, the country is now plunged into a legal swamp that could last years.
Anyway, the United States Constitution was never designed taking into account efficiency. The founders created a system of controls and balances. specifically to avoid concentrating power in the hands of a person. Our supine Republican Congress, for fear of alienating Musk and Trump, has abdicated his role in this critical balance, delivering control of the ropes of the bag to Trump and Musk.
“When you have an efficient government,” said President Truman once, “you have a dictatorship.”
In their impediment, musk and Trump are perfect for each other. They are the political reincarnation of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, the tragically absorbed couple of F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”.
“They broke things and creatures and then retired again in their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it kept together,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and let other people clean the disaster they had done.”
And oh, what disaster Trump and Musk have done.
The question now is whether the Americans will face this terrible two and withdraw our democracy from their little hands.
Bluesky: @further.bsky.social. Rags: @rabcar
