Misrepresenting the Swamp

Boy, do the Democrats not get it.  Or maybe it is that they don't listen, or perhaps that they just lie and keep lying until they think people will believe it might be so.  I think that's in Alinsky somewhere.

Such it is with the great "swamp", against which Donald Trump the candidate railed and because of which he is now the 45th President.

We all spent the election season laughing with the candidate as he vowed over and over to "drain the swamp."  We who actually listened to the words that preceded that vow each time, were quite clear as to what that swamp was all about.

The swamp was Washington, DC, and particularly two aspects,  The first was the entrenched, encrusted Congress that patted each other's backs and continued to spend tax revenues at rates far beyond what was actually collected, whose members were without term limits, stayed in Congress for decades, sometimes into their 90s, and were far more focused on their next election that serving the people.

The second was the entrenched bureaucracy of civil servants at places like Veterans Affairs, State and other agencies, unaccountable and virtually unsupervised, who couldn't be fired, however incompetent.  All of this "swamp" had under-served the USA for decades, which is why Trump's appeal to drain it resonated so well.

Except, apparently, with Democrats in general (even though Republicans, too, were quite present in the swamp), and with Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who is now the face of the Democrats, in particular.

Schumer, just this past Sunday, showed that lack of resonance in an interview wherein he was expounding on the incoming president's Cabinet nominees and why he was trying to slow-roll their appointments.  Schumer referred to them, and I quote, thusly: "We [the left] call it the Swamp Cabinet, full of billionaires and bankers ...".  He smiled as he said it.

Schumer is not, apparently, actually deaf, but he is either intentionally misrepresenting Trump's words or is flat-out lying.  The "swamp" was not the business community of the USA, and it was not the banking community.  It was not people like Ben Carson (HUD) and Betsy DeVos (education) and particularly not Rex Tillerson (State), none of whom was remotely associated with the Federal government.

Those were precisely the type of person that Trump said, all campaign, that he was going to bring in,  in order to drain the swamp -- people from outside government with a track record of success outside government, to bring in to make government work better.  They weren't the swamp, they were the cure.

I knew that, you knew that, and you can be darned sure that Chuck Schumer knew it and still does, no matter what he says.

You see, Chuck Schumer is a lifelong, card-carrying member of the swamp, with decades of representing only Chuck Schumer.  He is exactly what Trump ran pledging to fix, the career politician making a fat living off the public till, taking advantage of his long seniority (coming from a safely leftist state) to get key committee positions and the power of Senate leadership in his party -- exactly what term limits will ultimately fix.

But Schumer also knows exactly what the swamp is, and he hated that line (and now tries to change its meaning) because it was aimed at the Chuck Schumers of Washington, and he knew it.  The man whom you don't want to get in front of if there is a camera present, well, he needed desperately to shift the lens away from him when "swamp" came up.  Not being able to, he is simply lying about its meaning.

We know better.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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