Cronyism–noun, derogatory:the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications.
Kakistocracy-Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
Sycophant–noun: a person who acts obsequiously toward someone important in order to gain advantage.
Get used to seeing these words in the next few years. Well, I’ll be using them here a lot because they’re so pertinent to what will become the Trump administration.
With good reason, everybody is crapping their Pampers over Donald Trump’s nominations. He’s putting friends and donors in high places, and he’s even considering former rivals of his. Here’s a few examples. He’s nominated Betsy DeVos, a well known conservative billionaire donor and god-bothering public school hater, to head the Department Of Education. Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn was at Trump’s side as an advisor on foreign affairs during the campaign and now the paranoid, Islamophobic retread is being called up as his man on national security. Mitt Romney is groveling for a spot as Secretary of State. I’m sure you’ve all seen the picture of him and Trump at dinner, but it says so much I’ll put it up here:
If chosen, he will probably be the smartest and least reckless hire Trump will make, much as I dislike his rich privileged ass.
There’s another former rival who is being considered for HUD.
I can’t believe I have to talk about this guy again. He’s back.
Thanks, Trump.
Yes, we need to talk about Ben Carson, Dr. Smart Stupid.
As many of you may know, I haven’t been kind to Ben in the past, for a number of reasons. He’s made me sputter curse after curse after curse against him because he’s so fucking ignorant about everything except neurosurgery. He’s about as well informed as Donald Trump-he has no facts, just opinions and eyerolling bullshit to offer on any subject you like. Maybe that’s why they will get along.
So what does Gentle Ben know about housing? Only what he thinks he knows, as usual:
In the housing sphere, a recent study on behalf of the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that black and Asian homeseekers are shown or told about 15 to 19 percent fewer homes than whites with similar credit qualifications and housing interests. During the subprime lending boom, African Americans with good credit scores were 3.5 times as likely as whites with good credit scores to receive higher-interest-rate loans, and Latinos were 3.1 times as likely to receive such loans. And the Federal Reserve found that in 2009, African Americans were twice as likely to be denied a loan, even controlling for income and other qualifying criteria.
Carson believes that, despite this continuing discrimination, the Fair Housing Act needs to be weaker. In his Washington Times op-ed, the former surgeon labeled disparate impact suits “mandated social-engineering schemes,” and dismissed them as part of a “history of failed socialist experiments in this country.” Carson also aligned himself with a dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, which would have eliminated such suits under the Fair Housing Act.
So successfully suing because you have been discriminated against due to your race is part of”mandated social engineering schemes” and the Fair Housing provisions are “failed socialist experiments”.
I know, folks. They need to invent their own dictionary since normal people don’t know what the fuck conservatives are often going on about. They have their own Wikipedia and Facebook(though that one may have failed). They talk in a code only they understand. Let me try to parse the argle-bargle.
Let’s look at the loaded scare words first- “mandated” and “schemes”. They evoke ideas of mandatory participation in a system that is trying (“scheming”) to fool you. They don’t really mean anything. As for social engineering-someone needs to get Ben a history book not from Texas and explain that his black ass wouldn’t be anywhere without mandated social engineering-one of those tools used for said engineering was the Thirteenth Amendment. It said no more owning people. Another was the Civil Rights Act. No more discrimination in businesses and much more. If those aren’t social engineering…what is? Social engineering helps promote equality-and I bet since Ben made his first million, he hasn’t given a fuck about that because money is the key to escaping the problems that social engineering was created to address. As always, the conservative mantra-“fuck you, I got mine.”
Then we have more scare words in “failed” and “experiments”. If conservatives say something is “failed” enough, people will believe it(see entire Trump campaign). And “experiments” are only done on rabbits and holocaust Jews, not ordinary upstanding citizens! And unfailingly, conservatives still do not know what “socialism” means. When and if it ever comes, Ben, you’ll know about it. Until the last capitalist deposits the last check in the Cayman Islands, we won’t have socialism. Admittedly, we employ some progressivity (or liberalism, whatever you prefer) that looks like socialism, but isn’t interested in upending the social order or changing the ownership of the means of production-it just tries to smooth out the bad outcomes for people who may be left behind. As I said, Ben Carson doesn’t have to worry about bad outcomes, since he’s in the big bucks club. He doesn’t want to pay it forward, he wants to hold every penny. His only bad outcomes are missing the tax loopholes his accountant finds.
Ben Carson hates his race, unless it helps him be a token in the Richie-Rich crowd. Yeah, I fucking said it. If you disagree, show me that he doesn’t. Because his comments about housing, which is a basic human right, don’t show it. He is out of touch as out of touch can be. He doesn’t seem to understand the real reasons why there aren’t more Ben Carsons or Barack Obamas, and doesn’t really care. As far as I know, he could care less what happens to blacks or anyone else who can’t cough up the dough for a roof over their head now that he’s respected in the white world. But if he does deign to speak to the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, I can hear him now, lecturing to them about bootstraps and library cards as they hold three jobs to sustain the mortgage that my white ass would get a discount on-if they get a mortgage at all.