Speaking of Unserious
We deserve better than clowns giving political commentary.
There was a time when I thought that John Sununu was at least semi-serious. However, he clearly has decided that his path to money and maybe political office in the future is to cleave to the Trumpista line.
Also, here he is spouting more of this notion that the president is supreme:
Side note: he mentions balanced budgets in the clip the way many state-level types often do because most states (all?) require a balanced budget. Governors often like to talk like such an approach would work at the federal level. But, of course, states get to function the way they do because the federal government substantially backstops state-level needs (and provides a host of services to the citizens of the states that the state government, therefore, does not have to even consider). Put another way, part of the reason that states can function as they do is because the federal government engages in a lot of deficit spending. It isn’t because states are exemplars of fiscal prudence. I would note, too, that states do go into debt, they just don’t do it via deficits the way the federal government does.
And here is Sununu utterly misrepresenting the indirect issue.
He is simply wrong that cutting indirect rates will lead to more money for research. He is either going on national television and spouting from a place of ignorance (as his lack of knowledge of the ICA suggests) or he is actively lying (or both). It is a deeply unserious and damaging attempt at getting people to believe in unreality.
Let’s be clear: the issue is not, as he suggests, about stopping a bunch of professors from getting fired. It is about utterly undercutting the ability of major research universities to do research in areas of great significance, including healthcare and pharmaceuticals. The right-wing fantasy that universities are just full of gold-bricking pinheads is a dangerous, incorrect, and infuriating one.
There are a bunch of “centrist” Republicans, mostly governors, that the mainstream press likes to fawn all over. These are men of great reason, not ideologues but honest truth-tellers who rise above partisan politics.
One of the few good things about the current administration is being shown what a steaming pile of horseshit this has always been. These men are Republicans first — they care about making billionaires richer and squeezing out as much as they can for themselves. And they either don’t know or don’t care anything about the actual running of the state.
Sununu has always been one of the worst. I don’t suppose his whole-hearted support for dictatorship will make the Times any less eager to call him a ruggedly centrist man of the people, but maybe a couple fewer people will believe it.
Yeah, I don’t think “clown” is the correct characterization, “prick” fits much better.
The piece that seems missing from this debate is the whole Bill Clinton episode. Congress passed what was pretty much a line-item veto and Clinton proceeded to use it in ways they had not anticipated, provoking them to sue him to reinstate those payments and invalidate the act that they had just passed.
Of course, I have no idea if knowing this will make any difference. I’ve been wrong in my predictions pretty consistently the last year.
You know…
Not too terribly long ago, Bud Light beer had an (overly long) series of TV commercials called: “Real Men of Genius”.
Of course, the whole point of the commercial was to laud those that had NO actual genius, but as Bud Light drinkers were thereby worthy of adoration.
Clearly, the Republican party took this all too seriously, and their geniuses are not.
Trump and Musk are exploiting the public sentiment the right has long cultivated: that public servants and academics are all overpaid bludgers who rarely do any useful work. They know lots of Americans – probably a majority – will be cheering that “At last someone is making them get proper jobs”. When this is combined with the grotesque misconceptions so many Americans have about foreign aid*, I expect the so-called “DOGE” initiatives are very popular.
*A 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 30% of Americans believed that foreign aid accounts for nearly one-third of the federal budget. Only 3% of those polled answered correctly that foreign aid constituted 1% or less of total federal spending.