24

Are Musk and Trump out for retribution? Maybe. Would it be justified? Absolutely.

If this post was a TV show, it would be "24" and I would be running across your screen with the background clock ticking and Kiefer Sutherland saying "The following takes place between 4:00 and 5:00 AM before Mike was fully caffeinated on the morning of the Super Bowl."

I pulled this together from responses to various comments made on some of my posts overnight. Maybe it make sense, maybe not, but now it is out of my head and into yours.

You’re welcome.

This USAID attack plan wasn't cooked up in a week, they have been looking at this for years in anticipation of returning to the White House.

Musk actually said USAID was picked because historically, it was the agency most resistant to prying eyes. It's corruption and use as a slush fund has been known/rumored for decades. Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton's SecState, tried to end it and couldn't. Joni Ernst, current GOP Senator, detailed how she was threatened when she tried a few years ago.

As for people who claim USAID is a "measly 0.3% of the federal budget", that is still 50 billion dollars a year - and to my point a couple of days ago, a dollar stolen or wasted in this agency is tantamount to stealing it from the taxpayer on the input side and the intended recipient on the output side.

Musk did an anecdotal survey with people at Treasury and asked them for an estimate of how much outflow goes to fraud or waste - they said a billion dollars a week. America is almost 40 trillion in debt and the interest expense is more than we spend on national defense - we don't have money to waste on anything.

Credit card companies will cut off your card if it is a dollar over the limit. That is what we need to be doing in America.

Polls have said for decades that the American taxpayer hates foreign aid - I'm not sure that is completely true. I can only speak for myself, but I hate wasted foreign aid (and that includes money that goes to the enemies of America - like the Taliban), and USAID seems to confirm the opinion that most foreign aid is wasted.

Why is the right "slandering" USAID? Who says they are and what constitutes "slander"? You can't tell me that some things USAID has funded - like payola to US media (and even the BBC, for goodness's sake) don't deserve ridicule. In the irrational defenses of USAID by the left, the claim is if you object to money going for a transgender comic book for Peru or DEI training in Serbia, you want children in Africa to get AIDS, starve, and die. That just isn't true, what we want is for the money used for crazy ideological goals to go to the people who need it and not to color revolutions or for transing kids in Botswana.

People can certainly say anything about anything, but if one steps back and looks at actions rather than words, there is a clear right and wrong side to this argument.

The American left IS, in fact, trending toward totalitarianism wrapped in a patina of false concern for the welfare of people. They constantly find wedge issues of some disaffected minority to justify wholesale changes in the greater culture and the things they try to do to effect those changes are patently anti-constitutional and often evil. They claim to care about these groups while using them as cannon fodder in their greater war.

People will lay claim to the "both sides" argument, but there are a couple of measuring sticks - historical Judeo-Christian tenets are one and the Constitution is the other. When these standards are applied, there is a measurable difference between the sides.

You can't look at USAID alone. My bet is that the tools developed, used, and validated at USAID will be applied to every single federal department before it is over. The reason the fight is over it is so intense is that the Democrats need to stop Trump and Musk here or they risk losing it all. This is the equivalent of the Allies storming the beaches at Normandy in WWII.

I am entertaining bad thoughts for certain. My wife and I were watching (rewatching) Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen" last night and I started smiling when Michael Pearson (Matthew McConaughey's character) sent Matthew (Jeremy Strong's character) into a freezer with a fillet knife and told him he had to return with a pound of flesh, or he didn't get out of the freezer alive.

This can be about retribution, broken trust, and broken laws. These three things can all be true at the same time. I just wrote how I am in that frame of mind for what the left has done to America over the past two decades.