DOGE Is Doing the Clean-Up Leftists Can’t Stand
By Joan Swirsky
Within minutes, Honey and Irene “connect” in a phenomenon known as
human chemistry. They just seem to “get” each
other. And as their relationship evolves, they
learn that they are on the same page on just about
everything: raising kids, favorite foods, must-see
TV programs, Mommy-and-Me classes, even the
crocheting and knitting that their grandmothers
taught them. And each of them has three children,
with two of them having the same name!
As luck would have it, their husbands also hit it off and have
quite a lot in common, the biggest that both are
on-the-road salesmen.
Over the years, the couples become so close that they vacation and
celebrate birthdays and holidays together. Honey
and Irene even exchange house keys and list each
other as emergency contacts on medical forms.
All good...for 30 years!
Uh-Oh...
Then, one day, Honey gets a phone call from her bank manager, Mr.
Hervey, requesting that she and Hank come in for a
sit-down.
“Of course,” Honey says, speculating with Hank that the investment
they made with the bank’s money manager has either
yielded a brilliant bonanza or — yikes — has gone
bust.
When they sit down the next day with Mr. Hervey — whom they call
Linc, short for Lincoln — they notice a decidedly
serious look on his face.
“Look,” he says. “We live in a small town where everyone knows
everything about everyone else. I know Irene and
her husband Fred very well. And I know how close
you’ve been over all these years. I even know that
you exchanged house keys in case of an
emergency. And Honey, I know that you gave Irene
the PIN to your bank account, again in case of an
emergency.”
At this point, Honey and Hank are nonplussed, having no idea where
Linc Hervey is going with this strange introduction.
“Well, I hate to tell you this,” he says, “but we just discovered
that over the years — many, many years — Irene has
been withdrawing money from your account — very
cleverly, so you would never notice — but now it has
added up to a small fortune. A real fortune.”
When Mr. Hervey tells them the amount, they are both dumbstruck,
speechless, almost out of breath.
Enter Politics
Both Hank and Fred, as mentioned, were businessmen, capitalists,
conservatives. At the same time, both men tolerated
that their wives were liberals with do-gooder
instincts to save the climate, save the whales, save
humanity! Both men had decided that it wasn’t worth
arguing, because most other things in their lives
were so harmonious.
But sitting in front of the bank manager, who had just informed him
that his wife’s best friend was a colossal fraud, a
thief, and worthy of a felony conviction, Hank
immediately took out his iPhone and looked up the
numbers of his lawyer and his local police
department, with the intention of having Irene (and
possibly her husband Fred, as a co-conspirator)
served with papers and then arrested and, he hoped,
indicted and imprisoned.
Honey, on the other hand, started screaming at the bank
manager. “How dare you accuse Irene of any
wrongdoing? You are on a witch hunt. You have no
proof!”
“Unfortunately, Honey, we have empirical proof,” Linc said, “all
scrupulously documented on our computers, going back
years, in fact decades.”
Skip to 2025
Is this scenario not exactly what Americans — and, for that matter,
the entire world — have been witnessing in real time
as Elon Musk and his Department of Government
Efficiency (DOGE) discover the malfeasance, fraud,
and criminality of not the fictional housewife
Irene, but the real live people who run our massive
government institutions? To name only a few, there
are the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Pentagon, and
the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID). All of these have been
fleecing our country — with our tax dollars — not of
millions or billions, but of trillions of dollars!
In fact, DOGE has been unearthing the deep corruption involving
both Republicans and (mostly) Democrats and proving
the maxim that to unearth criminal behavior, always,
always, always follow the money!
We have learned that our elected officials have sent
vast fortunes to terrorist groups with
eye-popping millions upon millions of dollars. And
looky here:
Among other egregious examples of the kinds of waste, fraud, and
abuse DOGE has been uncovering is that tens of
millions of dead people are on our Social Security
rolls, many of them children and people over 115
years old! And look what DOGE found — that $4.7
trillion in payments from the Treasury
Department were “almost impossible” to track. That
is trillion, with a T!
DOGE has also found that California, New York, and Massachusetts,
three deep-blue states — surprise, surprise! — were
responsible for over
half of the fraudulent unemployment claims in
the United States since 2020, again involving
massive mountains of money.
Enter the Pearl-Clutchers
OMG, bleat the perpetually sky-is-falling, glass-is-half-empty
leftists. This is illegitimate! While, according
to Victor Davis Hanson, Musk acts
completely under executive authority.
Like Honey, they are shooting the messenger. That is
understandable. After all, most of the criminality
has been committed by the people they trusted, sent
money to, voted for, based their entire belief
systems on. Talk about an existential threat!
But unlike Honey, if it were their own personal bank accounts that
were robbed, you can be sure they would be squarely
in Hank’s camp, going after the crooks with the
intention of bringing them to justice.
They remind me of a child having a temper tantrum in Aisle 4 of a
supermarket — flailing arms, copious tears, kicking
and screaming, crashing the cans and breakable jars
off the shelf, simply because Mommy didn’t buy those
all-important Animal Crackers. “Clean-up in Aisle
4” is then blared over the loudspeaker.
That is what DOGE is all about: cleaning up the monumental
financial mess that our greedy and corrupt elected
officials and government agencies have inflicted on
all of us.
Here is a way to keep track of
the immense
savings — and criminality — DOGE is uncovering
every day. So far, literally billions — going on
trillions — in fraud, waste and abuse.
May this grand effort to Make America Great — and financially
solvent — Again continue unimpeded!
Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her
website is www.joanswirsky.com,
and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.
Image: JD
Lasica via Wikimedia
Commons, CC
BY 2.0 (cropped).
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