Children, gather ‘round while I tell you a tale of nomenclature past.
Once upon a time, the womb warriors were referred to as anti-abortion. Which was accurate, because as abortion-rights advocates noted, once a baby was born, they didn’t care about it any longer.
Now, this greatly offended all of the people who wanted to control what women did with their bodies. So they created their own terms to better disguise that, as far as they were concerned, the right to life started at conception and ended at birth. The same people who vilify a woman who knows she can’t afford a baby because she makes minimum wage, has no health insurance, and would have trouble feeding the poor kid, those same people refuse to raise the minimum wage and want to cut Medicaid, food stamps, and school lunches. (You’ve noticed that nothing has changed since the 1990s.)
So they browbeat the media into calling them “pro-life” when all they were was forced birth. And it took years for those supporting reproductive rights to stop that sanewashing.
We see the same thing with the uncritical use of the term DOGE, which supposedly stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. None of that is true. We should coin our own term DOGI. (More on that later.)
Naturally, DOGE is not a real government department. Real government departments are authorized by Congress with a mandate that Congress decides. Nor are the unvetted Musk Rats government employees; they work for the unelected shadow president Elon Musk, making sure to mimic his snideness and antipathy to anyone not White or male. Neither Elon nor his Musk Rats have security clearances. Lastly, have you ever seen efficiency accomplished with a chain saw? Me neither.
Although Elon pretends to be an engineer, his degrees are actually in physics and economics. According to Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk applied for the engineering program at Stanford University but never attended. The book was honest enough that Musk didn’t talk to his fellow South African for three years.
So to a pretend engineer, everything requires an engineer. That’s why you’re seeing so much chaos and incompetence:
- Crashing the Medicaid portal in all 50 states
- Firing the nuclear safety engineers and then having to scramble to rehire them
- Slashing the National Institutes of Health as the avian flu is spreading to cattle and humans and as measles is spreading
- Uncertainty to the extent that private information has been stolen
- Impairing efficiency and safety in national parks
- Firing FAA workers at the grossly understaffed agency even after airplanes began falling from the sky.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the Republican members of Congress who are hollering like beaten dogs.
Anybody interested in efficiency instead of pretend savings to justify the next trillion-dollar tax cut for Elon and his billionaire buddies would have hired accountants, CPAs, and actuaries. The fact that Elon instead empowered his Musk Rats shows that he doesn’t care about the chaos, or he didn’t deserve his degree in economics. You make the call, although I’m being influenced by Elon’s masterful move in reducing the value of Twitter to 20% of what he paid for it.
Which brings me back to the name change.
We have to be relentless in calling Elon’s band of idiots DOGI. The first three letters will of course continue to mean the Department of Government. But we’ll say that the I stands for so many nouns that we couldn’t really limit it to one: incompetence, inaccuracy, illegality, injustice, idiocy, idiocracy, inefficiency, irresponsibility, irregularity, imbecility, inadequacy, inanity, infamy, irrationality, impudence, impulsiveness, ignorance, illiteracy, inexperience, incaution, ignominy, inanity, irascibility, incomprehension, insecurity, intrusion — well, we could be at this all day, couldn’t we?
Progressives have changed the narrative through language before. Remember Star Wars? Not the movie. Ronald Reagan’s so-called Strategic Defense Initiative, an ill-conceived and ludicrously expensive anti-missile program. Once it was nicknamed Star Wars, who could take it seriously? Be sure you remember this as Trump, who has never seen a terrible idea he didn’t love, is trying to revive Star Wars. You know what you need to call it.
And you know what you need to call Elon’s party of incompetents: DOGI. Add that you didn’t vote for former undocumented immigrant Elon Musk, and you sure didn’t vote to be ruled by an idiocracy.
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