Essence.
Long-time readers will recall yr. correspondent’s abiding disdain for Grover “Bathtub” Norquist, which has occasionally bubbled over to an embarrassing degree; how nice to once more be reminded nothing changes:
“There’s a moment when people say, ‘Did you notice what percentage of this agency was viewed as nonessential?’ ” said anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.
(Well. One thing’s changed: as I’m now an employee of the federal judiciary, I get to take his bullshit personally.)
—I mean, it’s no “drown it in a bathtub” but hey, you can’t knock it out of the park every time you spit on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for a pithy soundbite. —And of course he knows that’s not what “essential” means, not in this context: it’s merely the all-too-cold equation being jerry-rigged all over the country to tell the difference between people who must show up and work, without pay, and those who’ve been furloughed—sent home, without pay.
“It’s inconvenient that they’re not getting paid,” Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser, said of the furloughed workers. “But it’s for time they’re not even going into the office.”
(I realize these think-tank apparatchiks have never worked a day in their fucknugget lives, but do they ever have even a glancing contact with the world the rest of us live in, paycheck to paycheck?)
Hopefully it never gets to the point where I can no longer afford the first secure job I’ve had in years. —But if it does, and planes start falling from the sky of his libertarian paradise, I can at least console myself with the thought of Norquist racing to the bathroom to heave his e. coli-infected guts into a bathtub he’s only just drained.
