Draining The Swamp: item 821
Quote:When Donald Trump announced two months ago that David Bernhardt was his choice to succeed Ryan Zinke as the new Interior secretary, it was immediately controversial for a variety of reasons. Bernhardt is, after all, a former oil lobbyist.
In fact, while serving as Zinke's deputy, Bernhardt had so many conflicts of interest, the Washington Post reported last year that he had to "carry a small card listing them all," because he "worked for years as a lobbyist representing many of the very businesses he now regulates."
To date, none of this has bothered Republicans on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. A series of new controversies, however, should theoretically put Bernhardt in a new light. The New York Times reported this morning, for example:
Quote:A previously unreleased invoice indicates that David Bernhardt, President Trump's choice to lead the Interior Department, continued to lobby for a major client several months after he filed official papers saying that he had ended his lobbying activities.
The bill for Mr. Bernhardt's services, dated March 2017 and labeled "Federal Lobbying," shows, along with other documents, Mr. Bernhardt working closely with the Westlands Water District as late as April 2017, the month Mr. Trump nominated him to his current job, deputy interior secretary. In November 2016, Mr. Bernhardt had filed legal notice with the federal government formally ending his status as lobbyist.
The Washington Post reported yesterday, meanwhile, that the Interior Department's Office of Inspector General is "reviewing allegations that [Bernhardt] may have violated his ethics pledge by weighing in on issues affecting a former client."
Benen
Trump's campaign rallying cry that he would "drain the swamp" came into clear perspective very early and has only become more clear 2+ years later. So what did he mean and what did his audience understand him to mean?
To the first question, I don't think he "meant" anything. I think he simply was working from a standard playbook on the right, particularly the "libertarian" playbook, which holds that government is bad, unnecessary, an impediment to initiative (and profit taking, though that doesn't get mentioned much). Grover Norquist's maxim "I want to make government so small we can drown it in the bathtub" is the precise distillation of the ideology.
But in right wing rhetoric and mythology, promulgated over many decades, this notion of a "swamp" at the center of government has been targeted to indicate "pointy-headed" types. That is, scientists*, anthropologists, schools/educators, psychologists, economists, artists, historians, etc. with an acute concentration on universities. Where do you find commies and atheists and moral relativists? Universities. This right wing rhetoric almost never targets corporate lobbyists and if it does, the sincerity of such complaints gets dubious pretty quickly. Trump made promises about lessening the contacts between lobbyists and his administration but exactly the opposite has been the case... and does anyone hear more than a handful of voices on the right complaining about this 180 degree shift?
So Trump was just spreading **** because he and his strategists knew it would work on his base and perhaps on others who had previously contacted this entire myth story the right has been pushing for so long.
What about his audience? That is the very troubling and depressing part of this whole story. Soaked in a daily bath of sentences and images and claims designed to make them stupider (if someone is lying to you, the goal is to make you stupider) they have fulfilled their half of the bargain.
*Probably the most well known example, the tobacco industry set to forwarding a propaganda campaign to encourage citizen doubt regarding scientific findings on caner even while their own scientists had long since known of this connection. They purposefully set out to make citizens stupider - for money. There are many more examples of such a strategy as in global warming produced by the burning of fossil fuels.
