The Borg of Uncle Sam...

Flopping Aces ^ | 03-25-25 | Vince

[Starman417]

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless, WWII was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won, and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training/support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro.

In the late 80s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, thinks they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy.

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life, I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite.

In college, I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it, LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power-hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters, he wanted to help solve long-standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself.

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s become the opposite.

[Taxman]

ping

[nopardons]

BTTT

[kickstart]

DITTO

[Mouton]

autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself.

and toward that end, they have assimilated many of our institutions. Listening to that POS judge in DC one sees he is a member of the collective. He dictates: Trump you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. As with the Borg, we need to turn their power off. The power in this case is MONEY.

[shotgun]

My dad was a retired US Army, combat wounded, WW2 and Korean War veteran. I was born in 1960 and my dad was my anti-bureaucracy mentor. Every postretirement benefit he received from the VA he had to fight for. We had no delusions that the Uncle Sam and the vast layers of bureaucracy were created to help the American people

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

While I think that's clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America's problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters, he wanted to help solve long-standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

I am just going to say that has to be the most stunningly naive statement I have read in the past week.

I hope this person is not allowed to wander around without a keeper.

[Tallguy]

Yeah, I guess this author has no familiarity with Johnson scamming himself a high military decoration, or his manipulating elections via fradulent votes. I believe that’s all in the Caro book. Maybe he just skimmed it?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

It is worse then that. He knows those things and still is able to push the delusion that once LBJ was president he suddenly became a whole new person who only wanted to help and that every single thing that he proposed only made things worse is not the dear man's fault because he "meant well".

These are the same things you hear about Carter and I have no doubt you will hear pushed very shortly about Obama and Biden.

No. When absolutely everything you do is a detriment to the country you supposedly care so much about, that is not just chance. That is deliberate.