The Swamp As Mountain Range

I was reading about the latest jaw-dropping admission of corruption from a government official, as detailed here in The New York Times:

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.

It’s not even clear he gets it.

I shan’t guess his name, as he – or she – might have a lawyer.

And it finally came to me. “Draining” was used merely in a newspeak sense. It’s been redefined as “getting as much as I can.” So the draining the swamp rhetoric which Trump used over and over and over to presumably attract moral, fiscally conservative voters was actually a siren song to all the, well, alligators are actually not what comes to mind. Think lamprey. Yep, that thing off to the right. Yep, every time Trump cried Drain the swamp! he was actually calling all those lamprey-like creatures to come to him, where he could give suckle.

Ugh, this analogy got downright ugly in a hurry. The sad part is that it’s not even in jest. If you think Mulvaney is an exception, you need to read up on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appears to be even worse than Mulvaney.

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About Hue White

Former BBS operator; software engineer; cat lackey.

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