So, how do you like being jerked around by the nose? Well, Hell, as long as you don’t have to think for yourself, it’s all good, right?

Tell me, does that brief paragraph convey a sense of anger and frustration? It should, because the last week has been a roller coaster of misdirection, misinformation, conflating, grandstanding, finger-pointing, and hate and discontent at a brand-new level; everyone should be feeling angry and frustrated. For all the talk of “unity,” the people we elected to lead us have gone out of their way to prove themselves elitists who think they have the rest of us over a barrel – and to a great extent, right now they do.

And again, the propaganda outlet you listen to determines who you think is at greatest fault. But I’m here to tell you, it’s on them all.

Yeah, I’m thoroughly pissed off. There are two terms, two concepts, that have become meaningless in today’s political arena. Those two ideas are “compromise” and “for the good of the people.” There isn’t a warm body in DC who is capable of either.

“We have a Nine Hundred Billion Dollar Covid relief package.” No, they didn’t, they just want us to think so. What they have is an Omnibus Spending bill of $1.4 Trillion, only part of which is earmarked for Covid-related relief; money for impacted businesses in the form of more low-interest loans (and related language specifying that they can still deduct expenses from their taxes, among other things), and a $600 payout for individuals. Except it might be $2,000. We don’t know because they keep jerking us around.

This Omnibus Spending bill addresses the spending required to keep the government open and running, foreign aid, and the myriad other things we seem to want the government to handle for us – including the latest round of “Covid Relief.” Many of those things – particularly the foreign aid – are publicly being lumped under the “Covid Relief” label; this is conflating two ideas into one, in order to inflame those of us who haven’t been keeping up (which, frankly, is a lot of us). The Democrats are including money not related to Covid relief in the “$900 Billion” to make it sound like they’re spending real money on it and placate their base, the Republicans are including the foreign aid part of the bill under the Covid Relief label to show how the Democrats are adding unrelated stuff – riders – to the Covid bill, and placate their base.

The President threatened to veto the Omnibus Spending bill if the individual payout wasn’t bumped to $2k, an idea the Democratic leadership has suddenly adopted as their own. But on Sunday night, he signed it – simply because a veto would have been overridden. He only wanted to create a moment of controversy, focus attention on himself, and doing so he opened the door for the incoming administration to continue to buy votes with tax dollars.

From what I hear, piercing the septum for the nose ring is only briefly painful. Of course, when the chain is attached and they start jerking you around, it’s the pain that makes you compliant…