Leftwing media denounces DOGE effort as a ‘cocktail of corruption’
Cognitive dissonance reigns supreme at Newsweek, which published an item by Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman on Tuesday, denouncing the temporarily-established Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts as a “cocktail of corruption, illegality, and harm”. It’s especially ironic, considering that Gilbert and Weissman are “co-presidents” of a nonprofit organization known as Public Citizen—two executives with equal decision-making authority? Does it get more inefficient and wasteful than that?
In fact, it’s such a cliché aspect of bureaucratic D.C. types that The Office once mocked this very dynamic when Dunder Mifflin’s new owner made Michael Scott and Jim Halpert “co-managers.”
No wonder these two find objectives like streamlining and efficiency offensive.
Anyway, back to the claim that cutting gross amounts of waste from the federal government’s outlays is somehow a recipe for disaster for the American people; Gilbert and Weissman argue that since both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are ultra-wealthy, they represent the one-percent, and will abuse their position to “hamstring government agencies” from abusing the little guy.
Well, speaking as a little guy, I’ve never felt more victimized than I do by my own federal government—what other entity has the legal latitude to steal my income and hand it to people who didn’t earn it, dictate how I’m to parent my children, and control what I buy or consume? If someone breaks into my house to steal my property or harm my family, I’m legally entitled to defensively use deadly force; if the government does it? Hopefully I, a peaceful, lawful citizen, make it out of the encounter alive, so I can spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers to fight whatever plot its operatives hatched and carried out.
In actuality, the government hamstrings the people from holding it (our elected officials, bureaucrats, and agencies) accountable.
The authors assert that DOGE’s mission is “unpopular” because Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s slashing will defund things like “education, Meals on Wheels, [and] national parks,” and write this:
DOGE is a bad idea. It's unpopular, irresponsible, and dangerous to slash critical, life-saving regulations and cut programs and policies we all care about and benefit from.
But, like all leftist narratives, this is rooted in fallacy—in this case, a strawman—and Gilbert and Weissman are distorting the targets to make their argument appear sound. First of all, education is a state-level mandate, so that entire agency needs to be abolished, but secondly, the main targets are obviously not the national parks we all use, or snatching food from impoverished families, it’s the $1 million to study quails drugged with cocaine and their sexual antics, or the $10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan’s universities, or the $42 billion for Kamala’s internet to nowhere, or the $7.5 billion for a handful of E.V. charging stations, or the Peloton memberships for every House staff member which could be as much as $1.5 million a year, and on and on and on.
And of course, nowhere do the authors talk about real transfers of wealth (Obamacare, eminent domain, lockdowns during Covid, etc) or abuse of power for self-enrichment (Biden crime family, Congress and the Ukrainian laundromat, insider trading, etc.).
Gilbert and Weissman conclude their piece by noting that DOGE is a “cocktail no one ordered” — except the 77 million Americans, a majority of the nation, did in fact order this.
What we didn’t order though? Cocktails of media stupidity and bias, yet here we are.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license.