SATURDAY: The Times agrees to play the fool!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2024

Id and Idiocracy: It isn't like something's hard to grasp about this ridiculous claim.

The ridiculous claim belongs to the apparent nutcase, Elon Musk. In one of several such presentations, he made the claim at Candidate Trump's October 27 Madison Square Garden event.

Hulk Hogan, a former "wrestler," directed a sexual insult at Kamala Harris that day—a sexual insult the New York Times, and Blue American tribunes in general, chose to disappear.

Musk didn't take that lowbrow route! Instead, he told a jampacked arena that Trump would be able to cut at least $2 trillion from the annual federal budget.

That, of course, is a lunatic claim, made by an apparent nutcase. Nor is that assessment hard to explain. In this post about the Garden Party, Kevin Drum explained it in the manner shown:

MSG report #3

Elon gets a whole post to himself. Not because he said something racist, but because he said something so massively dumb.

ELON MUSK: "I think we can rip out at least 2T out of the wasted 6.5T Harris/Biden budget."

Elon used to be smart enough to do simple addition, but he thinks we can cut "at least" $2 trillion from federal spending—which amounted to $6.7 trillion in FY2024, not $6.5 trillion.

The arithmetic here is simple. If you add up Social Security + Medicare + defense + veterans pensions + interest on the debt you get $4.4 trillion. There's only $2.3 trillion left.

So Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.

Drum included three footnotes, further detailing the obvious: 

As two of the footnotes noted, Candidate Trump had specifically pledged that that he wouldn't cut Medicare or Social Security. Also, Trump had pledged that he'd increase spending on Defense. In the third footnote, Drum noted that interest on the debt is legally obligated, as is the payment of veterans pensions.

In the face of these basic facts, so what? Thus spoke Muskathustra, at the Garden Party! 

As everyone knows, Musk's ludicrous claim makes no earthly sense. On last evening's Washington Week, Dan Balz and Jonathan Karl went through those same basic budget facts in the program's first five minutes, as you can see by clicking this link.

Elon Musk's demented claim makes no earthly sense. As his post continued, the understandably frustrated Drum let him anti-freak flag fly:

What is it that didn't just move Musk to the right, but turned him into a screaming, drooling lunatic with the effective IQ of a squirrel? I won't say I've never seen anything like it, but I've never seen it quite so unhinged from a basically sane and brilliant starting point.

In some ways, we think that Drum was possibly being too kind. That said:

In this morning's New York Times, four major reporters, on the front page, roll over and die in service to Musk and in deference to power.

We think it's important to say their names. We're going to say them here:

The names of the Times reporters:
David Fahrenthold
Alan Rappeport
Theodore Schleifer 
Annie Karniv

Who knows? Maybe it was their editors' doing! But those are the names which appear on the front-page report, and so we say them here.

Those of you with a Times subscription can read the full report. In this morning's print editions, the lengthy report starts as shown, dual headline included:

NEWS ANALYSIS
 Musk’s Pledge To Ax Trillions Faces Reality
Legal Fights and Lags Will Await His Efforts

These are frenzied times for the nascent Department of Government Efficiency.

In Silicon Valley, tech leaders are eagerly seeking positions or introductions to the department, even though for now it is not an actual part of government, but a loose grouping that Elon Musk named after an internet meme. On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk posted a “Godfather”-style photo of himself as the “Dogefather,” asking government employees, “What did you get done this week?”

And in Washington, a House subcommittee has been announced to help push through President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vision, announced on Nov. 12, for a department that would slash the $6.7 trillion federal budget.

Members of Congress—even Democratic ones—have been offering up ideas for where to cut what Mr. Musk said could be $2 trillion out of the budget.

“It’s going to be very easy,” Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, told Fox News on Tuesday, after she sat in on some of her son’s meetings. Mr. Musk will lead the department along with Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate.

The coming months will show if her prediction proves right.

These deferential reporters today! Early in their "News Analysis," the four reporters specifically cite the world's most ludicrous claim—the silly claim made by the apparent nutcase, Musk.

Thet cite the claim in Paragraph 4. They then cite the clueless mother of the apparent nutcase son. Astoundingly, they directly suggest that her ludicrous claim could turn out to be right!

The reporters quickly do those things. Here's what they never do:

In the course of their lengthy report, they never tell their paper's subscribers that Mother Musk's ridiculous claim, like the silly claim by her son, makes no earthly sense.  

As those headlines suggest, they focus on the bureaucratic obstacles which will stand in the way of the crusading Musk. They never tell Times subscribers that the stated goal of the planet's richest person makes no earthly sense.

In that way, the deferential reporters roll over and die, feet in the air, bowing to new political power. Along the way, they're even willing to insult Times subscribers by including this:

[I]n recent weeks, some members of Congress have shown enthusiasm for Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy’s ideas.

Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, took to social media this week to outline what she called “easy” steps to cut $2 trillion in spending. But even those steps showed the complexity of the task awaiting Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy.

Some of Ms. Ernst’s recommendations would be relatively manageable but for negligible savings—at least in proportion to the immense size of the federal budget. She said, for example, that the government could save $16.6 million by no longer providing campaign help to long-shot presidential candidates.

And one of her ideas directly clashes with one of Mr. Musk’s and Mr. Ramaswamy’s. The billionaires’ idea is to force federal workers to work five days a week in the office, with the idea that they will become more efficient or quit. But Ms. Ernst wants to take the opposite tack: allow federal employees to work from home and sell off the office space they no longer visit.

Presumably, Senator Ernst has simply decided to play the fool with respect to this topic too. That said, no one is playing the fool quite the way Farenthold and the others are as they paraphrase Ernst's ridiculous claim—her ludicrous claim that it would be "easy" to cut $2 trillion in spending.

Everyone, Ernst included, knows that claim is insane. That includes David Farenthold, who was once believed to be a fact-obsessed financial reporter.

Everyone knows that Musk's claim is insane. Everyone except Times subscribers, who are condemned to the task of reading today's "News Analysis."

The anthropologist Cummings seemed to know The Farenthold Four best. He chose to state his anthropological findings in the form of a bitter poem:

Humanity i love you

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

[...]

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink...

So true! Meanwhile, the public is being conned today on the front page of the Times. 

In this 2006 feature film, Mike Judge predicted the emergence of an "idiocracy." Today, the Trump-Musk id is in the saddle, and the idiocracy seems to be here.

This morning, the New York Times rolls over and dies. Elsewhere, Blue America's tribunes keep engaging in the practices through which our tribe has earned its way out down through the years. All too often, our Blue elites are joined in that project by our Blue rank-and-file.

We Blues! We've pursued that project for at least sixty years; we've pursued it hard in the past four years. As with all known human tribes, it is often hard for us to see such facts about ourselves.

It's hard for us Blues to see what we do. We return to that topic on Monday.