DOGE IS A DOG!

Why, why, why, why, why, why do so many people I admire ultimately turn out to be frauds, posers, or just plain horrible people in general?  Gary Hart, Marion Jones, Hillary Clinton, Eric Clapton, Bill Cosby,  James Howard Kunstler, Facebook "friends" I never meet in person - the list is endless.  Sooner or later, of course, those people you admire appear to jump the shark, and little do you know they'd been on the wrong side of the shark all the time.  And Elon Musk is the latest such person to join my list - for being a fraud (he didn't found Tesla), a poser (his "inventions" are even more useless than Beatles pal Magic Alex's prototypical products at Apple Electronics), and a horrible person (he's a Nazi).

It turns out he's worse than even all that.  As the director of the fictional Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE?), Musk is going on a rampage through the federal government, shutting down the United States Agency for International Development and locking out it staff after accusing the agency of fraud, taking over the U.S. Treasury and putting kids fresh out of high school in charge of the computers, and getting data on the finances and bank accounts of every American taxpayer.  Having direct and illegal access to our personal data, Musk can now use it to destroy someone who, oh, I don't know, speaks out against him or Trump.  Up to now, he's only been able to delete X users who do so.  Now he can comb through BlueSky and go after anyone there who's opposed to him (i.e., everyone there).  Kash Patel won't need to use his power as FBI director to stifle opposition against the government because Musk can do it himself.

With the Treasury under his thumb, Musk can deny Social Security payments and Medicare assistance to anyone at whim - either because they've written a critical letter to the editor about him, because they've used their social media platforms (or blogs) to spread the truth about him, because they were active in the movement against apartheid in his native South Africa (Steven Van Zandt, take note!), or maybe because you bought a Lucid instead of a Tesla.  He may already be looking for congressional Democrats to harass and persecute to drive them out of office (paving the way for turning Congress into a Supreme Soviet-style rubber-stamp legislature).  Plus several more horror scenarios I can't fathom right now.  With all of the power Musk gave himself by bullying his way into crucial agencies, no one is safe.

All I can do is to keep tell you what's going on.  And while I won't qualify for Social Security for awhile, I too, as a blogger critical of Musk, have reason to fear him.  And it's not because I ever said anything bad about his cars.  That's what makes this so disgusting.  I admired Musk for everything he did for electric vehicles.  Now I look at Musk and, well, I can't believe I actually liked this guy!  But, in pretending to engineer the cars he makes and in pretending to be developing pneumatic trains to get people to stop talking about high-speed rail and buy more of his cars, all while profiting from his government contracts with SpaceX (another reason he took over the Treasury), Musk has been giving America two faces for the price of one.