It was cute but now it’s over
Oh that whole drain the swamp thing? He didn’t mean it. Or he did, but now he’s bored with it. Or both. It was “cute” but now it’s over – which is just as well, since the swamp is full of mastodons.
Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” catch phrase was “cute” but that the President-elect now disclaims it.
During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Wednesday, host Rachel Martin asked if the former House speaker had been “working in the swamp, to use Donald Trump’s language.”
“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore,” Gingrich said, referring to the phrase. “I’d written what I thought was a very cute tweet about ‘the alligators are complaining,’ and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”
Oh, poor things – are they tired of hearing the political bullshit that they themselves put out there? That’s heartbreaking. Maybe they could take a long vacation on a very small island somewhere in the Pacific.
Gingrich added: “I personally, as a sense of humor, like the alligator and swamp language, and I think it vividly illustrates the problem, because all the people in this city who are the alligators are going to hate the swamp being drained. And there’s going to be constant fighting over it. But, you know, he is my leader and if he decides to drop the swamp and the alligator I will drop the swamp and the alligator.”
All the people in this city who are the alligators – and who are they exactly? Not the lobbyists for oil companies and banks and Walmart? Not the Koch brothers? Not ALEC? So who, then – the evil people doing research on climate change, are they the alligators? The civil servants in the NSC? The people at HUD and the EPA and the EEOC? Are they the alligators? While the billionaires and the oil CEO whose loyalty was to Exxon shareholders for 40 years and the conspiracy-mongering retired general are the cuddly soft toys?
What a pack of lying snakes.
“He is my leader”. Must disengage personal opinion and ethics filters (Spoiler: Gingrich has never had the latter, and an overabundance of the former).
I want to preorder the new Republican dictionary in which “cute”, “elite”, “patriotic”, “respect”, and apparently every other formerly English word doesn’t mean what I think it means. “Cute” is the right word here?
“Newt” is currently defined as “a small, slender-bodied amphibian with lungs and a well-developed tail, typically spending its adult life on land and returning to water to breed”. The new definition: “cold-blooded, slimy creature with a thin, sensitive skin; often toxic; endangered in many cases, but not the ones we might like; marked tendency to abandon mates in times of stress.”
“He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore”
He makes it sound like one of those expendable pussies. Pussies, policies, if you’re famous you can do as you like.
Apparently that whole ‘Lock Her Up’ business is through, too, because ‘we won now’.
I can’t find the reference right now, but I read an article a couple of days ago about how “drain the swamp” was interpreted differently by many folks in this country. While most readers of this page think of it as influence by moneyed interests, others think of it very differently.
For many, it’s the swarm of unelected bureaucrats that promulgate regulations that, however well intentioned, have hurt them. For the farmer, it’s the folks who reinterpreted the term waters of the United States so broadly that it applied to the drainage ditch adjacent to their property. For inner city parents, it’s the folks preventing school choice that are keeping their children trapped in under performing schools. For the auto worker, it’s the folks who pushed the fuel mileage standards up so high that the massive land yachts built in their factory could no longer be built if the manufacturer was to meet the average CAFE requirement. For everyone who worked in a location with a coal fired boiler (especially Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan where it’s common), it was the folks who wrote the mercury standard into coal emission regulations and shut down the factory because it wasn’t economical if they spent the money to put in new, more expensive boilers.
This is the swamp they were thinking of and it’s the reason they don’t seem to be too upset about the billionaires in the Trump Cabinet. They’re comfortable letting someone make money to do the job of draining their problem swamp.
^3 They didn’t need the slogan any more, so they exported it:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/chris-alexander-lock-her-up-chant-anti-carbon-tax-1.3880911
Bastards, the lot of ’em.
JimK, the problem is that many of those things you listed in the second paragraph didn’t actually happen that way; that is the hyperbole that is promoted at an ever increasing decibel level by people who hate the regulations, but often can’t cite real numbers, so they just make these vague, hyperbolic statements that crescendo so rapidly they begin to have the ring of truth.
There is so much wiggle room in most of the regulations that you can drive a truck through the loopholes with room left over. Many of the large vehicles, such as SUV, have managed to skirt a lot of the mileage regulations, though there has been some tightening in recent years.
As for the overly broad interpretation of waters of the US, the rules actually are not as stringent as people think they are, because the feds can only control interstate waters through the commerce clause; the other waters are up to the state.
For a lot of people, these simply serve as the justification for their hatred of the government, because it sounds much better to promote “freedom” than to promote “I hate Civil Rights and Women’s Suffrage, and I’m gonna pout and stomp my feet until they go away”.
Plus, they refuse to accept that putting toxic chemicals into the air and water has any real negative effect; until they accept this basic truth, they will not be able to see that there is a benefit.
Iknklst: I agree that those things didn’t happen that way, but many of the people affected believe they did and that’s their swamp.
As far as waters of the US, it’s not that broad, but bureaucrats keep trying to push it that way. A couple of years ago, the EPA asserted in a case in (Illinois I think) that the CWA gave them jurisdiction over a rural drainage ditch as the fact that it drained to a stream contained wholly within the State that drained to a larger stream that was contained wholly within the State that drained to a river that drained into the Ohio meant that the drainage ditch was a “water of the US”.
On another similar issue that involved the Corp of Engineers which I was personally involved in about 20 years ago, a rice farmer wanted to sell his property to the adjacent chemical plant which wanted to expand. The Corps ruled that his rice farm (which he hadn’t farmed but had run cattle on for the previous 3 years) was a “Statutory Wetlands” area due to the type of foliage growing in the abandoned rice fields and could not be developed. It took nearly $200K in legal fees to prove that a farmer damming up water on his property does not turn it into a statutory wetland.
Trump and Gingrich are old enough to remember The Addams Family TV episode where Gomez supported the Hilliard campaign immediately on hearing his promise to drain the swamps:
I just watched the episode again here. It aired a month before the 1964 presidential election, but it has issues that apply today: Money in politics, the women’s vote, social class of the districts, overconfidence…
@ ^
Completely unfunny and failing! Totally biased! Couldn’t get any worse! Has anyone seen the figures for Addams Family lately? Dead!
(/trump)
Ha!
“Mein lieber Herr” from Cabaret keeps coming to mind.
Ah yes, triggered by “but now it’s over.” The lyrics are a bit of an earworm for some reason.