In his militantly capitalistic crusade to make Amerika grate again and hate again, he aims to turn the federal Department of Education into the Bureau of Planned Ignorance. He has thus chosen a more incompetent (though much richer) person than himself to implement the transformation. But since even Donald Trump must realize deep within his lizard brain that Betsy DeVos is an intellectual looser (sic) as well as a woman, he has provided her with her own special reverse amanuensis to help her complete the destruction.
You didn't really expect her to do any actual work in her new job, did you? After all, she and her family have already donated a cool $2.25 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, and another $900,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She herself reached in to her deep pockets and personally gave a combined $1 million bribe to 21 of the Republican senators who voted for her confirmation on Tuesday.
But more about her manly ensis, one Jerry Falwell, Jr. He was Trump's first pick to kill public education, but he turned down the job in order to enjoy the continuous freedom to grift public funds and to game the federally guaranteed loan program for his own Liberty University students. He is one of the country's leading deans of the Church of Getting Wealthy With Jesus, a/k/a The Moral Majority.
Like Trump and Betsy DeVos, he inherited his wealth directly from his daddy. Like them, he'd spent a lot of time bribing politicians to do his bidding before finally figuring he could just cut out the corrupt middleman and screw the public all by himself. And he won't even need to be confirmed by the Senate before he becomes the de facto dis-education commissioner!
That's because Trump appointed him to lead a task force whose sole purpose is to divert public money from public schools and funnel it into private institutions... like Liberty University. Since Betsy DeVos herself has no experience in education, Falwell will not in fact be taking much, if any, dictation from her. He'll be doing all the diktating.
Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Falwell manfully and humbly boasted that his task-master force "will be a big help to her and do some of the work for her."
Forget George W. Bush's pathetic question, "Is our children learning yet?" Because Jerry Junior's mantra is going to be "Is our children hating yet?" Just in case those godless librul courts do overturn Trump's travel ban on Muslims, Falwell aims to get Amerikan students locked, loaded, and ready. After the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015, he suggested that the kids start packing concealed heat. “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them,” he fumed at the time with all the rapturous Christian fundamentalism he could muster.
While Amerika's children are reaching for their guns to kill terrorists and grizzly bears, Falwell will do his gosh-darnedest to curb the godless overreach of the federal government at the same time that he's playing God and dictating the moral behavior of young people.
At his own institution, students are not allowed to have "sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman." But given that 65,000 of them take all their courses over the Internet, enforcing this rule must be a truly awesome task for him. So perhaps in his new gig, Falwell can get the 17 recently unified klans of the Inteligence Community (sic) to help him out with his peeping tom duties.
Like Trump, Falwell abhors the freedom of the press, especially at Liberty University. When students criticized his endorsement of The Donald last year, Falwell censored the college newspaper and removed a column critical of Trump.
Censorship is already gearing up to be one of the core governing principles of the overreaching Trump regime. When the Senate voted right after Betsy DeVos's confirmation to officially muzzle one of their own -- Elizabeth Warren -- for daring to quote Coretta Scott King's criticism of Attorney General Designate Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, you sort of get the inkling that the rest of us might also be in deep, deep trouble.
There is apparently a rule in the Upper Chamber which forbids members from condemning one another's behavior. That is really kind of quaint, given how the tradition fetishist Senators are so willing to overlook their president's serial assaults on common human decency. But since Trump has proven that hypocrisy is a winning virtue, they'll join him with impunity, rather than bother continuing to pretend-scold him for his serial transgressions. Who can even keep up with them, especially when most of their time is taken up with legalized graft.
Meanwhile, the abysmal treatment by Republicans of Amerika's Progressive Darling is predictably enriching the coffers of the corporate Democratic Party by fomenting yet another bout of hashtag outrage from the base. From the New York Times:
Immediately, Democrats took up Ms. Warren’s cause, urging on social media for Republicans to “#LetLizSpeak.” Ms. Warren said on Twitter that Mr. McConnell had “silenced Mrs. King’s voice” on the Senate floor, to say nothing of “millions who are afraid & appalled by what’s happening in our country.” Within hours of being shut down on the Senate floor, Ms. Warren read the letter from Mrs. King on Facebook, attracting more than two million views — an audience she would have been unlikely to match on C-Span, if she had been permitted to continue speaking in the chamber.Enjoy C-Span while you've still got it. (I could take or leave Facebook, myself.) And stock up on those books. Ajit Pai, Donald Trump's nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission, says he wants to take a weed whacker to the FCC. (So there's one more reason, as if you needed any more, to keep gas cans out of the vulgarian hands of the Trump mafia.) And that whacking job of Pai's could also well include the deliberate slowing-down of public information, such as C-Span feeds of congressional sessions. According to press freedom advocate Craig Aaron, Pai "has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue that has come before the FCC during his tenure. He’s never met a mega-merger he didn’t like or a public safeguard he didn’t try to undermine."
Is we detecting a pattern yet?
