The Galt's Gulch* Presidency

The emerging nightmare that is the administration of neo- fascist Putin pal Donald "Rump" Trump not only has it's Goldman Sachs/ fossil fuel baron imprint on it, but something as or more disturbing, as James Hohmann points out:

The president-elect said this spring that he’s a fan of [Ayn] Rand and identifies with Howard Roark, the main character in “The Fountainhead.”  [snip] 

[Secretary of State designate Rex] Tillerson prefers “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s novel about John Galt secretly organizing a strike of the creative class to hasten the collapse of the bureaucratic society. The CEO listed it as his favorite book in a 2008 feature for Scouting Magazine, according to biographer Steve Coll. 

Andy Puzder, tapped by Trump last week to be secretary of labor, is an avid and outspoken fan of Rand’s books. One profiler last week asked what he does in his free time, and a friend replied that he reads Ayn Rand. 

Mike Pompeo, who will have the now-very-difficult job of directing the Central Intelligence Agency for Trump, has often said that Rand’s works inspired him. “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me,” the Kansas congressman told Human Events in 2011. (our emphasis)

For anyone not familiar with the basic tenets of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism", Hohmann gives us a helpful vignette:

Remember that scene in “Dirty Dancing” when Baby tries to get that waiter who knocked up Johnny’s dance partner to pay for her abortion? He refuses and instead pulls out a weathered copy of “The Fountainhead,” urging her to read it. “Some people count, and some people don’t,” he tells her. Jennifer Grey’s character responds by pouring a pitcher of water on him. In popular culture, the Rand acolytes are that guy. 

The fact that all of these men, so late in life, are such fans of works that celebrate individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing. They will now run our government.  (our emphasis)

"Some people count, and some people don't." That was certainly the guiding principle of the Trump campaign and will certainly be the same for the Trump administration.

BONUS:  More from Driftglass.

BONUS II: It's good to recall John Rogers' oft-quoted snark about Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

BONUS III:  Jonathan Chait on why Rand still appeals to Republicans.
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*Galt's Gulch is where the main character (John Galt) of Rand's dystopian novel "Atlas Shrugged" repairs to lead a strike by business leaders against the government (as noted in the Tillerson graf). The self- anointed plutocrat elite rebelling against government that allows "poor people to 'leech' the hard-earned wealth of the rich..." Sounds like the blueprint for the next four years.

Also, this distillation of Rand's "rational selfishness" creed:

Today's Cartoon And Comment - Paul Ryan's Waffle House And "Dark Fantasy"

(click on image to enlarge)


(David Horsey, Los Angeles Times)

When he's not waffling along with his fellow spineless weasel Republicans about supporting that toxic waste dump also known as Donald "Rump" Trump, media charmer Rep. Paul "Lyin'" Ryan is busy trying to divert attention from his and his party's embrace of Rump in order to salvage his power base in the House (while collaterally electing Rump, of course). To do this, he's been sharing a dark fantasy of a dystopian progressive America under a President Hillary Clinton to any credulous meathead that will listen. Here's Paul Krugman's analysis:

According to him, it’s very grim. There will, he said, be “a gloom and grayness to things,” ruled by a “cold and unfeeling bureaucracy.” We will become a place “where passion — the very stuff of life itself — is extinguished.” And this is the kind of America Mrs. Clinton “will stop at nothing to have.” 

Does today’s America look anything like that? No. We have many problems, but we’re hardly living in a miasma of despair. Leave government statistics (which almost half of Trump supporters completely distrust) on one side; Gallup finds that 80 percent of Americans are satisfied with their standard of living, up from 73 percent in 2008, and that 55 percent consider themselves to be “thriving,” up from 49 percent in 2008. And there are good reasons for those good feelings: recovery from the financial crisis was slower than it should have been, but unemployment is low, incomes surged last year, and thanks to Obamacare more Americans have health insurance than ever before. 

So Mr. Ryan’s vision of America looks nothing like reality. It is, however, completely familiar to anyone who read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” as a teenager. Nowadays the speaker denies being a Rand devotee, but while you can at least pretend to take the boy out of the cult, you can’t take the cult out of the boy. Like Ms. Rand — who was basically writing about America in the Eisenhower years! — he sees the horrible world progressive policies were supposed to produce, not the flawed but hopeful nation we actually live in.

More "Midnight in America." He and Rump aren't far apart at all.

Ripped From The Headlines

Headline at Raw Story:

"New ‘lost’ Ayn Rand novel will bring her crimes against literature to new generation of jerks"

Somewhere, Rep. Paul "Lyin'" Ryan (Jerk-WI) is feeling a tingle up his leg.

(Photo:  Ayn Rand, fez-zy "thinker")

Medicaid Expansion In Virginia: Health Care For Me, Not For Thee!

Virginia representatives are debating whether to allow Medicaid expansion in the Commonwealth, and the usual suspects are coming out of the Koch closet woodwork to offer their solicited testimonials:

On Wednesday, Colonial Heights insurance agent Frank Lundie stepped up to offer his story at a news conference in front of his business. He said he had been reluctant to speak but had to, given what Burke said in the 18th century: that evil triumphs “when good men do nothing.” 

Lundie went on to say that the premium on his personal insurance plan doubled and his annual deductible rose by $2,000 as a result of the law. The Affordable Care Act led to the cancellation of millions of existing insurance policies, he said, so even by the White House’s “fuzzy math,” more people lost insurance than got it. 

His complaints centered on problems with the broader health-care law, not Medicaid expansion per se. But Lundie and Republican leaders argued that the law’s well-known flaws are reason enough to resist expansion. 

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see,” Lundie, quoting [Ayn] Rand, told about 50 politicians and business leaders at the gathering.

Well, we certainly know what bees are buzzing in Mr. Lundie's bonnet, given the Ayn Rand and Edmund Burke quotes (freedumb!), and equating affordable health care with "evil."  You're quite the frothing nut compassionate conservative, Mr. Lundie!  We look forward to someone doing a fact check on the Koch brothers'  Lundie's story;  we'd be willing to bet it's like every other fabricated pile of bullshit being generated by the right, notably the Americans for Plutocrat Prosperity.

In the meantime, we like what this letter writer had to say in this morning's once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle:

The March 9 Metro article “Who deserves to receive Medicaid? Residents echo lawmakers’ debate” contained a nugget that seems to define precisely the argument against expanding the program. It quoted a man who earns $11,670 at his job, just over the poverty line, but doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. He struggles to afford his asthma treatments. The article then quoted a woman opposed to expansion: “Tabatha Weathers, 27, said the abuses she’s seen have made her wary of opening up Medicaid too broadly. ‘Somebody like me, I need it,’ she said . . . [S]he couldn’t afford her obstetrician appointments without the Medicaid she receives.” 

There you have it. Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act is just another effort to create a boondoggle program. As long as you already have Medicaid.

George Chuzi, McLean

We'd like to hope that, for every Frank Lundie (and Mrs. Lundie? see comments) and Tabatha Weathers, there are at least four George Chuzis... and that they vote.

(Image:  Ayn Rand -  "the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see" is her self-serving hypocrisy, Mr. Lundie, and yours.)

Hitting the Rethugs' Philosophical Underpinnings

The American Values Network has this spot out drawing attention to the Ayn Rand - New Confederate/Rethuglican Party philosophical bloodlines, hitting the immorality of their "right-wing social engineering" (P. Gingrich). The Democratic Party would be wise to follow this line of attack to illustrate just how far out of the moral mainstream Rethugs and their reactionary proposals are.