What Did They F**k Up This Week?

Week Ending 2/22/2025

Feb 24, 2025

Another week, another slate of missteps, misinformation, and mismanagement of the American government. Let’s dig in.

A Crisis Hotline Isn’t Important, Is It?

Republicans love to support the troops. They are all about the guns, the military flyovers at sporting events, the flag, all that shit. Until those same troops retire from the military or are otherwise discharged. After all, once they hang up their guns, these people who volunteered to be grist for the military wheel are no longer of use to the administration but are now a drain on precious resources that could go to other, more deserving folks. Like TechBro billionaires and other elites. Hey, these were tough soldiers, why would they need any mental health care? That sounds suspiciously woke.

Given this, it should be no surprise that part of the cuts at the Veterans Administration, cuts that were described as “non mission-critical personnel” included folks who man the VA Crisis Hotline. People whose job is to try to talk the most at risk of our veterans off the ledge, sometimes literally, were let go.

MAGA loves the troops though.

Things Are Great With Air Travel These Days

Raise your hand if you are looking forward to flying, well, anywhere any time soon. I mean, I know that flying is still the safest form of travel, but damn if the folks over at DOGE seem to want to change that. Despite the first major fatal crash in 16 years, along with several other fatal incidents, there have been about 400 people fired from the Federal Aviation Administration. When news of these firings broke the government claimed that no air safety personnel were let go, but the union that represents about 130 of those let go disagreed.

the union representing about 130 of them said the staffers included aviation safety assistants, maintenance mechanics and nautical information specialists.

Sounds like bus and train travel are back on the menu boys!

I’m Not a Dictator, You Are a Dictator

I tend to make this piece pretty snarky, but it’s really not funny how Dear Leader DJT had the absolute stones to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator on his “Truth” Social platform this week. Afterwards, when asked if he felt that Russian leader Putin was a dictator, Trump avoided the question. Multiple T2.0 staffers have been asked variations on either “is Putin a dictator” or “did Russia start the war” and to a man, they have all declined to answer.

Cowards.

Musk Is A Tech Wizard

So much of the mythology surrounding Elon Musk centers on the idea that he is some sort of tech wunderkind, a savant whose acumen dwarfs that of us commoners. In reality, he is more of a rich kid who got to buy a lot of the coolest toys.

This was pretty evident early in the week when he started posting stuff to X that claimed that his DOGEPups had found “thousands” of people on Social Security rolls who were 150 years old, or more. 1

His baseless claims were picked up and broadcast by White House Press Secretary KKKaroline Leavitt, who doubled down and claimed that “tens of millions” of dead people were getting fake Social Security benefits.

One minor problem, that many of my even tech-adjacent friends cottoned to almost immediately: Musk was almost certainly looking at the data wrong. Turns out we were all right, but you won’t hear KKKaroline hit the airwaves to clear up here mistake.

Why Would We Know That?

T2.0 lawyer types had to appear before Judge Tanya Chutkan last week to defend their reckless job cuts. The judge wanted to know how many federal employees had been mass fired over the previous weekend, but the attorneys couldn’t answer her query. She was not impressed.

“The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small or common thing,” she said incredulously, according to Klasfeld. “You haven’t been able to confirm that?”

What a time we live in.

Really, It’s Just a Minor Math Error

In an attempt to be “more transparent”, DOGE has a website now. Aside from some growing pains, they are apparently having some content accuracy issues as well. One of the pages is a “wall of receipts” that brags about how much money they are allegedly saving by haphazardly fileting the government and canceling contracts. The largest contract that was listed was for a whopping $8 billion. Hey, if we can save that much money all at once, that’s good, right? Well, yeah, it would have been, if it were not off by an order of magnitude. The actual contract amount was $8 million. Oops.

But hey, when you are doing this much cutting, there are bound to be a couple of minor mistakes, right? Yeah, about that.

Kryptonite

I mentioned in yesterday’s piece that strong women are Trump’s kryptonite. I wanted to follow up on one of these strong women, Maine Governor Janet Mills. After Mills stood up to DJT at a Governor’s Luncheon last week, the Department of Education opened a Title IX investigation into Maine. Shocking, right? Governor Mills issued a statement, and it’s a great read. She pulls no punches.

In America, the President is neither a King nor a dictator, as much as this one tries to act like it – and it is the rule of law that prevents him from being so.

You Picked Who?

I generally want to use this space to point out actual failures by this admin rather than decisions that are rife with failure possibilities, since listing the latter would result in a voluminous tome that would basically boil down to “everything they did this week”. That said, I would be remiss not to touch on the absolute travesty that is now the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There are many, many folks who believed that Kash Patel was perhaps the worst and most dangerous of all of Trump’s Cabinet picks, and I don’t disagree with that. Patel is an outspoken critic of the very agency he was tapped to run, and he has no experience in running any organization of this size or importance.

In one podcast appearance, Patel vowed to shut down FBI headquarters on Day 1 and reopen it as a "museum of the deep state."

Patel is also the author of Gangster Government, a book that includes an “enemies list” as an appendix; 60 people that he claims harmed the government of T1.0. But not to worry, Patel told Congress that he wasn’t going to do anything illegal as head of the Bureau.

While Patel has no experience, this is not necessarily a novel situation. Common practice in situations like this will be to have a career agent chosen as the Deputy Director of the FBI, so while the Director is the public face, the Deputy actually handles the day to day.

With that in mind, the logical choice for Deputy Director is clearly former Fox News host2 and current conspiracy whack job Dan Bongino. Because we are broken and live in the stupidest timeline.

If you are not familiar with the man who looks like a thumb that was shot up with steroids just after a workout, here’s a quick intro to the #2 at the FBI:

I’m sure everything will be fine.

Take Care and Stay Strong

Analysis Paralysis

Discussion about this post