Why Don't You Tell Me?

There's a lot going on with the world, but MAGA only seems to care about Donald's old pal Jeffrey.

The philosopher Cicero wrote a treatise in 44 BC called On Duties (Latin title De Officiis) that breaks down humanity’s moral obligations. Cicero argues that the very point of government is to ensure a relatively level playing field for the less fortunate amongst us. Without government, there’s nothing stopping the privileged and the wealthy from behaving like lions, gobbling up all the resources. Sound familiar?

Flash flooding in central Texas has left more than 120 people confirmed dead, with at least another 170 still unaccounted for. Much of the coverage of the horrific tragedy has centered around Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp for girls, where at least 27 campers and counselors are confirmed among the dead. The vast majority of the deaths have come from Kerr County, home to 53,000 people.

The tragedy in Camp Mystic is every parent’s worst nightmare. Camp Mystic has a policy that’s likely relatable to those of us who remember the 1900s (Slightly after Cicero’s time). Camp Mystic does not allow its campers to use their phones.

I actually like this policy. My childhood summers would have been drastically different with those annoying tiny screens fluttering about. I used to spend all day, each summer with people I haven’t spoken to in years. Kids should get a chance to see what it’s like to have to rely on humans you only tangentially like to fill your social calendar. Fortnite and TikTok can’t always be the answer.

The phone policy certainly affected the death toll for Camp Mystic, but this was avoidable. County officials knew of the flash flood risks to Kerr County. It would have cost one million dollars to implement sirens across the region, sirens that would have warned these campers, sirens that would have taken the place of their phones for their idealistic, old-fashioned summer.

Texas’ state government only wanted to foot the bill for part of the sirens. Kerr County declined to come up with the rest. Blame for this clearly falls on Governor Greg Abbott and his cronies at the Capitol in Austin. Kerr County is a sparsely populated region of roughly 1,000 square miles (for reference, Los Angeles County, where I live, is four times the land mass, but is home to 10 million people against Kerr County’s 50,000).

Does Greg Abbott want to talk about blame? Of course not. He’d rather talk about football.

“Winners train, losers complain.” That’s Abbott’s answer to why state lawmakers were too miserly to help out little old Kerr County.

Winners don’t point fingers, according to Governor Abbott. Losers, are the ones who point fingers. Instead of wondering why Texas, with all its prosperity, couldn’t help Kerr County and its campers who literally died because their government was too cheap, Texans should instead be focusing on scoring the next touchdown.

I could tell you that the government is not supposed to be about winners and losers. A common refrain when DOGE had its chainsaw and its cheesehead in full swing was the reality that many government services are not supposed to be for profit, but to help the people. As Cicero puts it, government lending a hand to someone is not explicitly at the cost of anyone else.

But the thing is, we have these things called elections. The reason we have “right track, wrong track” polls is to gauge how the country feels its elected officials are doing. If those polls are lopsided in one direction, it’s generally a good indicator of which party is going to do well in the next election.

Angry Texans don’t need to pretend that a horrific tragedy is an episode of Friday Night Lights. It’s not a binary choice between whining and kicking field goals. They could, you know, vote these shitheads out of office.

Like, presumably, Governor Abbott, I too had a big crush on Tim Riggins

Abbott and his clowns are fairly insulated from that kind of democratic thinking. Texas has 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Republicans hold 25 and Democrats have 13, including one that is currently vacant due to Congressman Sylvester Turner’s death in March. I only counted six that were within ten points for the last election. Ten points is a pretty big margin, but Texas state officials are worried enough about the tides that they’re considering doing some pretty undemocratic redistricting during a special legislative session.

I don’t know about you, but gerrymandering your state seems like something a loser would do. Winners don’t cheat, unless you're Trump, with his sharpie and all those gold trophies from his own private clubs. But Greg Abbott doesn’t know anything about being a big fat loser, does he?

I recently read Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A lot of people are angry at Tapper and the less famous Thompson for writing the book. The two primary complaints are that this stuff should have been reported a year ago, and that the two are essentially taking up multiple news cycles with their for-profit book, months after the fact, while Trump undoes the frameworks of the federal government.

There’s a lot of merit to both concerns, though questions about Biden’s age and stamina permeated the news cycle well before his disastrous June debate last year. It’s also likely true that as reporters, Tapper and Thompson were unable to find enough sources willing to either go on the record, or enough of them on background to print these stories until after the election. The American people were not well served by the media’s lack of curiosity.

I don’t bring this up to defend either Tapper or Thompson, both first-rate reporters who likely did a bad job probing their sources within the insulated Biden White House. Many of us didn’t really care how old Biden was when faced with the prospect of another Trump term. An 82-year-old Biden was still a hell of a lot better than the Fanta Fuhrer at any point in his miserable life.

Pete “Kegseth” Hegseth is in deep shit again. Our Fox News weekend host turned Secretary of Defense recently unilaterally made the decision to halt congressionally appropriated weapons from being delivered to Ukraine. When asked why the weapons were halted, Trump’s response was, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”

A familiar refrain after Biden’s ill-fated debate with Trump was: Who’s running the country? Many Americans have an image of the President as sort of like the Wizard of Oz, pulling all the levers all at once, omniscient as to the mechanics of the federal government. The reality is decidedly less exciting.

Roughly three million people work for the federal government, give or take the ones that Trump fires each week while pretending like The White House is hosting the new season of The Apprentice. The people who claim that Biden’s cognitive state didn’t really matter sort of had a point. There’s a reason we have a Cabinet. There are thousands of people spread out across the fifteen executive departments of the federal government entrusted with the actual mechanics of making everything work.

One person is supposed to reign supreme over all of this. The Founding Fathers consolidated extraordinary power in the Executive Branch, repeatedly and frequently reaffirmed by our right-wing Supreme Court. Obviously, no person can do this alone, even as Trump once stood on a stage yelling, “I alone can fix this.” The Constitution recognized this, and empowered the President to appoint people to his administration, subject to Senate approval, to carry out his will.

The Constitution did not exactly empower Cabinet officials to go rogue. President Andrew Johnson was subject to the first Impeachment in American history for firing his Secretary of War (the same post Kegseth now holds), a violation of the “Tenure of Office Act,” which stripped back the President’s right to fire members of his own administration. The Tenure of Office Act was repealed some twenty years later by President Ulysses S. Grant. Few Constitutional scholars believe the law would have survived any challenge brought before the Supreme Court. Johnson was essentially well within his rights to fire a Cabinet member he didn’t like, first appointed by Honest Abe, strictly for the reason of not liking him.

Hegseth is busy applying his bronzer in his Pentagon makeup studio, doing his thing. Does MAGA care? Of course not. They’re busy with the Epstein files.

Trump looking very defensive as he’s asked about his old bestie.

A few months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Epstein Client List was on her desk. Now, there is no list. What the hell happened?

MAGA didn’t vote for officials who care about floods. They’ll probably re-elect Ted Cruz after he embarrassed the Lone Star State yet again with another vacation in the middle of a crisis. Whether it’s floods or storms, you can guarantee that Rafael Ted Cruz will take his time coming home, probably worried about what his wife and her boyfriend will be up to when he’s not eating Campbell’s Tomato Soup on his stool in the corner of the bedroom.

I doubt any of them care that Trump has no idea what the official language of Liberia is, complimenting the president of the West African nation on the English he’s spoken since before Trump was busy cheating on his first wife.

Cicero believed that government at its core existed to protect the interests of the people, especially those who struggle to protect themselves. MAGA is in revolt right now, not because of the shitty job that Abbott’s done over in Texas, or the rogue antics of a former weekend morning cable news host, but because the Trump administration has stopped going along with a conspiracy theory involving a former close friend of the current president.

Elon is apparently so concerned about it that he’s continued to break with his former boyfriend, after accusing him of being on said list a few weeks ago.

Rome is burning while MAGA chases a conspiracy that dates back to the first Trump administration. Will any of this move the needle? I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?