Bannon's "Deconstruction", Or Is It Destruction? - Of The Administrative State

24 Hours later: "And  the press is YOUR enemy! And we gonna build that wall"


For those who may have missed it, the slimy swine Steven K. Bannon emerged from his pig warren at the White House to appear at the CPAC confab this past week.  Ever arrogant in his supreme swinehood, and seated alongside Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Bannon dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. Rather, he said, the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order.

Good luck, Bannon! Others before you have tried and failed miserably. Seeking to energize the assembled knuckle draggers and lackeys, Bannon bellowed:

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken, “every day, it is going to be a fight.", referring to the media and opposition forces arrayed for truth and facts against these Nazi scheits.  And let's be clear Trump doesn't fart unless it has the approval of Bannon. He has a hand in nearly every scripted public Trump utterance, and had expressed  similar sentiments to what Trump spat out at the conference the day after..

The porcine slob continued, “And that is what I’m proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this, all the people who have come to him and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to moderate’ — every day in the Oval Office, he tells Reince and I, ‘I committed this to the American people."

Actually, Trump and his gang of hoodlums are committed only to the 40 % or so who voted for them, believing their lives would improve. The other 60 percent are solidly opposed and dedicated to total resistance and political warfare. That is until such day we can replace the current odious so-called government with one acting in the People's interests, as per the Constitution. As the Founders themselves wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"

Got that, Stevie boy?

To tell the truth, as I watched clips of Bannon and Priebus' buddy routine on CNN it triggered flashbacks of Oscar and Felix in “The Odd Couple” - with Reince in the role of Felix and Bannon as Oscar. (Though truth be told at times Priebus came over more like Pee Wee Herman with his squeaky voice.)

But the most show- stopping moment transpired when Bannon boldly announced the Trumpies were dedicated to the  “deconstruction of the administrative state,” meaning the system of taxes, regulations and agency oversight the current structure of government supports. In other words, presumably eradicating all those elements of the federal "bureaucracy" that ensure your milk is free of fecal matter, your burgers of E Coli., your drinking water of perchlorates and lead, and your canned tuna free of botulism. Oh, also that medical devices are properly manufactured and sterilized to acceptable standards (FDA regs), i.e. so when you get your colonoscopy the colonoscope didn't just come directly from insertion into another patient..

In other words, taken literally, Bannon was advocating nothing less than terrorism against the civil state, the effective working government that has the general welfare as a primary role.

But wait! Maybe I misconstrued Bannon's yapping to mean destruction of the administrative state, when he actually used the term "deconstruction".  Is there a difference? And if so, what is it? The meaning of destruction is clear to anyone with more than air between the ears. It would be the effective destruction (or gutting from the inside)  of the federal agencies to which Trump's band of despicables have taken up posts, including the EPA, Department. of Energy, Health and Human Services etc.

If those are destroyed and hence the ability of the government to ensure the general welfare - a form of national security (perhaps the most basic) - then we are indeed talking of a form of terrorism.

On the other hand, if Bannon really did mean deconstruction, one must question what exactly he's talking about.   To fix ideas, French philosopher Jacques Derrida is the founder of deconstructionism - a marginal area of modern philosophy that purports to "deconstruct" literary texts and specifically :

"a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings."

Read that carefully and process it in strict terms of fidelity to the meaning of the term he used. If we take Bannon seriously what he really said is that he is committed to a literary or philosophical criticism of the administrative state - not that he actually intends to abolish it. THAT would be destruction, not deconstruction. Is Bannon not smart enough to discern the difference? Or did he just append the word to his babble to try and impress the gathering of conservative hacks, yes men, lackeys and nitwits?

So, if we take Bannon literally it means his (and Trump's agenda) is not to destroy the federal agencies that protect our land, air, food and water but rather to challenge their underlying assumptions regarding "certainty, identity and truth" by a kind of literary criticism method.

This would entail questions posed to the agency heads and rank and file workers like:

1) Do we really need to check restaurants for sanitary standards? Can't we tolerate a little bit of roach feces and fly larvae in the pantries and on the foods, and some norovirus in the salads? Can we not allow just a bit more food poisoning - like at Chipotle  - to get higher profits?  If all restaurants have the same lower standards we all win, no?

2) Do we really need to regulate the amount of agricultural fertilizer runoff into lakes and streams giving rise to cryptosporidium,? (The parasite that made 440,000 Milwaukeeans sick in 1994)

3) Do we really need to inspect meat packing plants for E. coli. and whether the automated butchering process splatters it  into burgers?

You get the point. Each of these questions seeks to probe for degree of certainty, something any genuine Derridian who invokes deconstruction should appreciate.

Then there is identity. Is meat really meat?  Is there really such an entity as 100 % pure meat? (Meaning animal flesh). Isn't it okay to count pink slime as meat or at least as 50 percent filler? How about a teeny weeny bit - maybe a half ounce - of misplaced cow turd or floor shavings to pass as "meat" filler? Say if it gets caught in the grinder in the meat plant.  When is ice cream ice cream? How about a definition permitting a bit of errant drip off the roof - some of it carrying squirrel urine - to pass as ice cream if it accidentally ends up in the mixer below? Must the company really re-outfit the plant at great expense to avoid that?

And finally, there is truth. Rhetorically again - following Bannon's train of deconstruction:  Are we really expected to go after a company when its ground beef is claimed to be 100 percent beef but it's really 70 percent pink slime?  Isn't pink slime edible? Of course!  Or say a company advertises tuna as 100% wild caught when it is all farmed? Or a dairy claims its milk is pasteurized when it isn't? What's the big deal? It  takes a lot more money to regulate all these items when we could just take the word of advertisers or companies that make the products.

So the question then is whether Bannon's agenda means merely using questions like the preceding to push a Derridian deconstruction of the administrative state - OR - does he out and out mean destruction of that state?  The difference is critical because on the one hand we contend with mere words, and on the other hand,  actual actions which can impact one's health and security.

Of course, assorted nitwits. pundits and op-ed dunderheads see no problem. Like one moron (Patrick Armstead) writing in The Denver Post op-ed pages last Sunday who wrote (p. 6D):

"Obama's EPA became the primary vehicle for implementing regulations like the Clean Power Plan without asking Congress  for a vote",

Well, uh yeah, Sparky....because "congress" - meaning the Repukes, were mainly taking every other day off or doing nothing but obstruction while millions across the nation (including here in COS) were being poisoned by the mercury spewed out from coal -fired power plants.

Of course, this is the same turkey who also wrote: "Instead of giving the man voters elected a chance to govern they have written him off as an authoritarian and opted for total resistance."

Well, first it appears more and more this traitor was actually more elected by the Russians. As the intel agencies and FBI coalesce findings in their investigations this appears more and more likely.

 As for being called an "authoritarian", it doesn't take a Mensa level I.Q. to figure out that if a guy insists the "press is the enemy of the people"- like Hitler did ca. 1933, that he's an authoritarian. And also  if a guy dispatches ICE agents to break down immigrants' doors and haul them away, he is an authoritarian. And if he threatens violations of the Posse Comitatus Act  i.e. by sending federal troops to Chicago-  he is also one. This stuff isn't rocket science. And as one former Harvard professor of psychiatry (Lance M. Dodes) has noted: "If I see a guy yelling on the street about unseen enemies and flicking a switchblade - I don't need a DSM V manual to determine that he's mentally unbalanced."

So no, we don't have to give the Swine- in- chief (who suckles on the Sow Nazi in residence) any more chances than we have to understand he's a Hitler in the making and full on resistance is the order of the day.

Opposing our efforts there will always be the soft soaping media enablers such as Sabrina Tavernise ('Are Liberals Helping Trump?', Feb. 18) and WaPo hack Marc A. Thiessen ('The Left's Hypocrisy On Trump's 'Enemy of the American People Comment').At least Tavernise tried to show some balance in her coddling of the Trumpies, while Thiessen showed little or none. He hyped the "venom spewed by the left at anti-Trump rallies" but said nothing of the venom spewed by Trump - which as we've seen has now given rise to hundreds of hate crimes. That includes the murder of an Indian techie in Olathe, KS by a hard core Trump supporter babbling his same rhetoric. Can this fuckup hack Thiessen point to ONE incident where the "hateful Left" has vandalized one Jewish gravestone (far less 68 like the Trump Nazis), or burned a Mosque (as in Tampa last week) or shot an Indian student dead (mistaken for a middle Eastern immigrant)?  No? Then don't even attempt to inject false equivalence!

So he needs to shut the fuck up and train his sights on the real enemy here. The pretender passing for a president who doesn't know the first thing about the job and treats the truth with utter contempt. Meanwhile, the rest of us - not into giving the Trump Nazis a pass - must continue our resistance and keep doubling down until we oust this whole set of assholes and hurl them into history's dumpster. Most of humanity believed we'd seen the last of Hitler wannabes after 1945, but evidently not. There's now an authoritarian narcissist psychopath who wants to duplicate the Fuhrer's stunts and wreckage of a nation. We cannot let him.


See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/george-lakoff/71462/the-public-s-viewpoint-regulations-are-protections


And:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/71367/trumps-oddly-exhausted-cpac-speech