Showing posts with label deep state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deep state. Show all posts

Friday, May 5, 2023

Deep State? What Deep State?

Image by Michael Knoll from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory."  -Brian Stelter                                                                                                                                         

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

I've got some shocking news America. An awful lot of the news media engage in the practice of what I call purple journalism (yellow journalism on drugs). 

From my glossary:

Purple JournalismJournalism as currently perpetrated by many news outlets that claim to be professional, unbiased, and factual. In reality, they are partisan, prone to sensationalism, and motivated primarily by the bottom line.

Worse yet, many outlets...

{You have a keen eye for the obvious sir!}

I was next going to say, before being rudely interrupted, that many media outlets are apparently part of the deep state but...

{For what it's worth, paranoia strikes deep. Into your life, it will creep...}

But (and that's a big BUT) like many alleged conspiracies, as I've written elsewhere, the term conspiracies of convenience more accurately expresses what's going on. And by the way, fading Boomer cultural references are my job.

{Please forgive me.}   


Conspiracies of convenience (COC) form when there's money and/or power to be had which often leads to the formation of groups of special interests, deliberately or spontaneously, that scratch each other's backs with no collusion necessarily necessary. 

Unlike conspiracy theories, which are by definition usually impossible to prove or disprove (which is part of the fun), a COC is, more often than not, obvious to any individual with a modicum of intelligence.

This brings us to <insert menacing fanfare here> The Deep State. 

{I was starting to wonder...}

The deep state is both a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy of convenience. 

The billionaire George Soros is named as a player in many a deep state conspiracy theory. He filled his money bin by pulling some seriously shady sh... shtuff. But he's since given a lot of it away to all sorts of good causes which would seem to be indicative of just a man with a guilty conscious.  

However, he's also currently (in)famous for funding the political campaigns of several "woke" district attorneys that are helping to trash certain cities by not prosecuting this or that "minor" crime or the rapid release of thugs in the name of social justice. 

Tell us, Batman, what's he really up to? 


On the other hand, we're knee-deep in conspiracies of convenience, many so blatantly obvious that you could easily make the case that they're more like socially acceptable corruption than conspiracies. 

Many people call the hooge and ever-expanding administrative wing of The Fedrl Gummit the deep state. I refer to the thousands of unelected bureaucrats charged with applying and administering encyclopedia-sized bills. 

These laws are composed by another division of the deep state that everyone's aware of. I'm referring to the thousands of lobbyists, lawyers, other bureaucrats, consultants, etc. who also work to get your congressperson to vote yea or nay on bills without ever having actually read them.

This is what a conspiracy of convenience looks like, a whole bunch of people scratching each others... backs on the down-low and the members of the purple press filtering the story (if they don't deliberately choose to ignore it) through an ideological narrative. 

(In their defense, photo ops, attending lunches and meetings with the usual suspects, keeping a weather eye on the next round of elections, and not passing budgets — balanced or otherwise — keeps congresspersons very busy. They even occasionally fly home to meet the folks.


Now, as for the deep state behind the deep state...

{Yes! A real conspiracy theory at last!}  

No. 

I'm talking about the spies, and politicians, that are supposed to be on our side.

They're not supposed to cover for Uncle Joe's clearly corrupt son who was so wasted he forgot about a computer that he used as an electronic journal documenting his bizarre life  — with pictures.

Our professional spooks are not supposed to sign a letter declaring it to be a Russian covert opp and then say — never mind — two years later. 

The purple press is not supposed to bury the story and then say oops — two years later.

The purple press is not supposed to virtually ignore the recent revelation that our current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was possibly the mover and shaker behind the bogus letter.  

Go a'googlin', enter "blinken behind letter declaring laptop to be russian info," or something like it, and discover how little coverage the story is getting by prominent news outlets.


My conspiracy theory? We've been programmed to accept blatant government corruption as just another day in the Swamp. Move on folks, nothing to see here.  

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day


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Friday, June 3, 2022

The More Things Change...

Original title: Republicrats v. Depublicans (7/29/15)

Image by chayka1270 from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason." 
                                                                                                       -Mark Twain


Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

I'm spending the summer in a cabin on a beautiful lake somewhere in the Swiss Alps, working on my memoirs, and trying to decide if this column will resume post-Labor Day. The market has found me wanting; I'm buying all of my own coffee. So be it, I remain an unrepentant supporter of capitalism. 

My big brother Eddie is my only financial supporter so I'm starting to feel like Van Gogh... without the world-class talent but with both ears. I'm also considering publishing only when the spirit moves me. Cranking out columns week after week, while enjoyable, is hard work — well, intellectually speaking — at least for me. 

{It sure ain't roofing or the like you whiney b...}

In the meantime, I'll be republishing (relatively) gently edited columns with updated statistics and facts in [brackets].  


With apologies to JFK, I ask not why the federal government is so jacked up, I ask why it works as well as it does. I'm not an anarchist, only a sorta/kinda libertarian. I believe we need rules on the playground as well as an intelligently designed safety net. I would like the rules to be as few in number as possible and rationally conceived to maximize fun and minimize stepping on each other's toes. 

In light of our national debt, 57,000 [92,000] bucks each as this is being written and steadily increasing as you read this, cutting spending [prior to modern monetary/free lunch theory anyway] is always on the agenda. Both parties define cuts as spending a little less on planned increases over a ten-year period, to make "cuts" appear larger.

Think about that. Congressperson Stumblebum looks into the camera and with steely resolve states that if re-elected she'll [he'll/they'll] battle to get government spending under control. How? Simple. Increase spending by slightly less than already planned, over the next decade, and call it a spending cut. She won't put it like that though. She'll tell you that under her plan spending at the Department of Bonkercockie will be reduced by a billion dollars a year. With a little luck, Congressperson Stumblebum will be a lobbyist long before that decade is up and she'll no longer have to dirty her hands running for office in order to get her dirty little hands on other people's money.

She, and most likely the media source that provides you with this information, won't bother to mention that we don't have ten-year budgets. We have one-year budgets, at least in theory. Congress hasn't actually passed one since 1997. The one currently proposed is a product of the Republicrats, Depublicans don't support it and if it is passed in its present form, Mr. Obama has made it clear he will veto it.   


President Obama created the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010 to study and make recommendations for fixing our financial problems. You may have noticed The Fedrl Gummit has maxed out its credit cards, but the issuer (themselves) keeps sending out new ones (to themselves).

The commission was originally a provision of a bipartisan law that would require Congress to vote only up or down on the commission's recommendations since apparently Congress long ago lost its ability to compromise on virtually anything. The law didn't pass because some of the original Republicrat co-sponsors voted against their own bill.

Mr. Obama decided to set up the commission by executive order. The commission came to the conclusion that if we were to plug enough loopholes and eliminate enough special favors and social engineering from the tax code we could lower everyone's taxes. Toss in some real spending cuts and entitlement reform and now we're getting somewhere. Mr. Obama, and Congress, stuck the report in a drawer and returned to job one, staying elected. 


Mismanaging our money is not the only task the federal government excels in. No private entity can hope to match the government when it comes to creating Rules&Regs. The Federal Register (which contains 70,000+ pages as of 2020) lists all the rules and regulations you're supposed to follow if you have the good fortune to live in the USA.

If there was a board game called, "Life In a Free Country," in addition to the instructions on how to play the game there would be a multi-volume set of books [PDF files?] containing all the Rules&Regs you need to follow in order to remain on the straight and narrow as determined by Congress and the 2,711,000 [2,878,000] non-military employees of the federal government. 

How many Rules&Regs are there in the land of the free?  According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute's 10,000 Commandments 2021, "Since the Federal Register first began itemizing them in 1976, 208,155 final rules have been issued."

How on Earth did Congress find the time to write so many Rules&Regs? That's where the 2,711,000 [2,878,000] bureaucrats come in. Realizing that writing all those Rules&Regs themselves would be inefficient and detract from time on job one (see above), Congress passes legislation that authorizes the bureaucrats to create the Rules&Regs needed to put the brilliant ideas of their overlords into effect.

This practice helps to stimulate the economy by providing work for registered lobbyists [12,137]. Never let it be said that our fearless leaders can't hold their own when matched up against the folks that ran the Roman Empire into the dirt.

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day


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