The house speaker has the arrangement backwards. Mr Johnson is the employee. We (TheAmericanPpl™) are the employer. He works for Us. We pay his salary. Dig? We NoKingers are taxpayers, Johnson. If you’d step outside your own head and look around you’d soon find that the protesters you so cavalierly dismissed as “un-American” are themselves GovCo employees (just like you!), war veterans, investors in T-Bills, IBonds, TIPS, stocks of military sub-contractors etcetera etcetera. Collectively not only are very many of these protesters paying your salary – never more reluctantly so – these hard-working Americans as you so cynically refer to them when it suits your purpose are directly invested in America. And you have the temerity to refer to them as “un-American?” You ungrateful sniveling little toady. Who do you think you could be? If I were king I’d fire your ass in a hot second. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It used to be said, mostly by Libertarians but old-fashioned, small-government, abolish-the-income-tax republicans as well, that it was government employees who were parasites on capitalism and thus they were the real “un-Americans.” How dare you try and reverse the shibboleth. You want to see a real un-American, Johnson, look in the mirror.
Mr Johnson is a lawyer; according to his wiki page he was especially adept at defending religious liberties. How quaint. Before creeping into congress he once defended a group that wanted tax incentives to build a Noah’s Ark amusement park (on a property adjacent to the owner’s Creation Museum) against the loud objections of local taxpayers who didn’t want to pay for this nonsense. Johnson won the case, on a legal technicality, but you have to ask yourself why he would align himself with the cause of religious wingnuts. Unless, maybe, he’s come to believe that these wingnuts are the real Americans, and that it’s the disbelievers (and/or believers in the wrong fantasy) who are the un-Americans, and the best way to rid the country of these un-Americans is to out them, turn real Americans against them, and in this way start a holy war.
Just thinking out loud here.
Rod, while you are indeed correct that Johnson is supposed to be working for the American people, and I’ll also concede that he is a toady, as are the majority of politicians, your admittance that you’re a “NoKinger” leaves me somewhat baffled as the United States is most assuredly not a monarchy. The U.S. is supposed to be a republic, but unfortunately it has descended into the madness of a representative democracy with suffrage for all, and all Americans suffer from this madness.
I think it unfortunate that you seem to have a penchant for the midwittery of the unhinged to reality no kings blather. Though I agree with your disdain for politicians, most of whom seem to simply be professional grifters, I am at a loss as to why you would want to associate yourself with a group of individuals such as the “NoKingers” you seem to admire, as many of them to have no real grasp of what is actually happening to America as a result of their voting for it and receiving what they voted for good and hard.
My takeaway from the No Kings’ protests is that they were really about drawing Americans attention to the numerous warning signs that the country is slipping into a Kingdom, and to sound the alarm bell in time so that maybe (hopefully) the people who can do something to stop the slide do that something before American governance begins to resemble Italy’s in the 1920s. Maybe representative democracy will work right to get the ball rolling, we’ll have to wait until late next year to find out.
“A penchant for midwittery…” Good one. Not in thirty years of writing have I ever heard that attributed to me.
And don’t confuse solidarity for admiration. There were reportedly 7+ million of us protesters across the country (peacefully) exercising our constitutional right to redress the government. I can’t possibly know the mind of all of them well enough to say I admire them. That would commit the error of stereotyping. But I (and HW as well) did feel a solidarity with the overall message of the protests and that’s why we went.
Rod, America is hardly turning into a “Kingdom,” a more apt description is that America is become an oligarchy controlled state, thus the no kings protest is totally off the mark and attempting to call attention to a delusion, and your solidarity to the delusional is very questionable, as is your joining them on the streets. It causes me to wonder if you’re supportive of individuals such as Mamdani, Priztker, Spanberger, etc., initiatives such as DEI, and other ineptitudes spouted by the unhinged and unthinking, not to mention relying on the hopium of voting your way out of it.
I don’t agree with your diagnosis of delusion, obviously. We talked with many ppl at the protest we attended, talked with friends of ours around the country who attended their local version, and read reports from others online. Americans (real ones) are all over the map with their concerns; autocrat, dictator, despot, tyrant, king, cult leader, asshole – they all refer to the same malignancy known as MAGA. Don’t get worked up over the no king moniker, it was just a name for a much bigger thing, the tocsins are unmistakable.
There’s a horse in the hospital, John.
Horse in the hospital? Well, better than a unicorn disguised as a donkey in the WH.