President Musk orders a shutdown

Elon has no clue what government does, or how it works

Dec 19, 2024

“what if we gave an erratic gazillionaire free rein to clownfuck America’s government? how long would it take him to run it into a ditch and set it on fire?”

it’s a question no one asked, but nonetheless we now know the answer: less than 24 hours.

yesterday morning, the House was working to pass a ‘continuing resolution,’ in order to keep our government funded and running through the holidays.

by the end of the day, the Space Nazi — who is apparently now the un-elected president-elect of the United States — managed to convince House Republicans that having no government at all is the True Way Forward.

here’s how that shit went down.

House Republicans are too dysfunctional to pass actual budget bills any more. real governmenting, you see, is hard. it’s so much more fun to hold pointless hearings where Marge Greene gets to show off her precious photos of Hunter Biden’s freakishly ginormous trouser hog. but actually sitting down and crunching the numbers and making sure everything adds up? oh, please. that’s not why any of these performative-nonsense rodeo clowns came to Washington.

so nowadays, instead of real budgets, what we get are ‘continuing resolutions,’ where everyone goes yeah, let’s just keep on doing what we’ve been doing, and kick the can down the road. maybe in the Spring we’ll have gotten our shit together enough to pass an actual budget, but for now let’s just keep funding everything at the same levels as the last resolution so the government won’t have to shut down.

and everybody pats themselves on the back, the government keeps running and Marge dusts off her photos for the next round of hearings.

that’s the world we all woke up into yesterday. House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson had cobbled together the latest in a long line of CRs, and the House was set to vote on it — and that’s the point at which the Space Nazi was all yeah, no, hear me out: how fucking cool would it be if we had no government at all?

“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”

and that is pretty much all it took to derail the CR — because that’s how the Space Nazi rolls. any pol who does something he doesn’t like, he threatens to use his obscene wealth to oust them from office.

an hour later, he tweeted out this.

“No bills should be passed Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero.”

the Space Nazi would be just fine with a month-long shutdown — because he has no fucking clue what government does, or how it works.

shutting down the government means shuttering all non-essential services. want to visit a national park? forget about it, you can’t. do you need your passport renewed? go fuck yourself.

essential workers — like the air traffic controllers who keep planes from crashing — they’ve still got to show up for their jobs, but they don’t get paid until the government reopens.

here’s what happened when the government shut down during Donny’s first term.

The 35-day shutdown, the longest in US history after surpassing the 21-day shutdown of 1995–1996, led to 380,000 federal workers being furloughed, and an additional 420,000 workers were required to work without any known payment dates, forcing many to find other paid work or protest against the extended period of the deadlock. Sharp reductions had to be made on payments from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Internal Revenue Service faced delays in processing around $140 billion worth of tax refunds,the FBI faced major disruptions to some of its investigations, staff shortages in the Transportation Security Administration caused airports to be closed down, and economic growth was reduced by billions of dollars.

do you think the Space Nazi gives a shit if some postal worker has to go a month or longer without seeing a paycheck? fuck no, he doesn’t. besides, he’d love to see the post office sold off for parts and privatized. anything that makes our government fall apart all the faster is a boon to him and all his cronies.

so, to recap: an un-elected oligarch is dictating disastrous policy to suit his own needs, by posting threats on his Nazi-infested app — and he’s getting away with it.

great system of government we got here. it’s like Barnum and Bailey’s freak show meets a steel cage match with brain-dead wrestlers.

later that day, the Doughy Pantload-Elect issued his own edict from Motel-a-Lago: ok, we can have a CR, but it has to also increase the debt ceiling.

“statement from President Donald J. Trump and Vice President-Elect JD Vance:

The most foolish and inept thing ever done by Congressional Republicans was allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025. It was a mistake and is now something that must be addressed.”

the debt ceiling? why the fuck is this demented dimwit yammering out of nowhere about the debt ceiling?

here’s why: because the current debt ceiling is the only thing standing between Donny and the massive tax cuts he wants to bestow on his plutocrat pals.

Senator Chris Murphy, am I right?

“Remember what this is all about: Trump wants Democrats to agree to raise the debt ceiling so he can pass his massive corporate and billionaire tax cut without a problem. Shorter version: tax cut for billionaires or the government shuts down for Christmas.”

‘government of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs’ is working out just great for the oligarchs — but not so much for the rest of us.

current government funding runs out at midnight Friday. if a CR can’t clear the House and the Senate and be signed into law by Joe Biden by then, it’s shutdown time.

now let me talk you down off the ledge, because there is good news:

these shitfucks haven’t even taken office yet, and they’re already eating their own faces.

government shutdowns are wildly unpopular — and these dummies are going to try to engineer one just before the holidays. talk about a War on Christmas.

every shutdown since the one Newt Gingrich engineered thirty years ago has been disastrous for Republicans.

Donny’s Confederacy of Sewer Clowns is going to continue to overplay their hand. just wait until they try to go after Social Security. they’re going to have a major uprising on their hands. listen to Robert Reich.

There may be a silver lining to this Gilded Age cloud. The lesson of the First Gilded Age is that when concentrated wealth, corruption, and ensuing hardship for average working Americans become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of us, we rise up and demand real, systemic change.
It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average working people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it.

let’s give the final word to Adam Kinzinger, because he’s so fucking good at messaging.

“President Musk this morning made it clear — with all his vast government experience, which is basically, he became rich on the federal government — that he doesn’t want Republicans to pass this. and seemingly, Vice President Trump kind of backed him up at that point. this is going to be a messy 4 years.”

here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.