Clean Up in Aisle 4!
By Joan Swirsky
In this allegorical scenario, Honey and Hank moved into a cozy home in a small community in New England 30 years ago. The next day, their neighbor, Irene, brings over a hot, homemade casserole to welcome them to the neighborhood.
Within minutes, Honey and Irene “connect” in a phenomenon known as human chemistry. They just seem to “get” each other. And as their relationship evolves, they learn that they are on the same page on just about everything: raising kids, favorite foods, must-see TV programs, Mommy-and-Me classes, even the crocheting and knitting that their grandmothers taught them. And each of them has three children, with two of them having the same name!
As luck would have it, their husbands also hit it off and have quite a lot in common, the biggest that both are on-the-road salesmen.
Over the years, the couples become so close that they vacation and celebrate birthdays and holidays together. Honey and Irene even exchange house keys and list each other as emergency contacts on medical forms.
All good…for 30 years!
Uh-Oh…
Then, one day, Honey gets a phone call from her bank manager, Mr. Hervey, requesting that she and Hank come in for a sit-down.
“Of course,” Honey says, speculating with Hank that the investment they made with the bank’s money manager has either yielded a brilliant bonanza or — yikes — has gone bust.
When they sit down the next day with the Mr. Hervey — whom they call Linc, short for Lincoln — they notice a decidedly serious look on his face.
“Look,” he says. “We live in a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else. I know Irene and her husband Fred very well. And I know how close you’ve been over all these years. I even know that you exchanged house keys in case of an emergency. And Honey, I know that you gave Irene the PIN to your bank account, again in case of an emergency.”
At this point, Honey and Hank are nonplussed, having no idea where Linc Hervey is going with this strange introduction.
“Well, I hate to tell you this,” he says, “but we just discovered that over the years — many, many years — Irene has been withdrawing money from your account — very cleverly, so you would never notice — but now it has added up to a small fortune. A real fortune.”
When Mr. Hervey tells them the amount, they are both dumbstruck, speechless, almost out of breath.
Enter Politics
Both Hank and Fred, as mentioned, were businessmen, capitalists, conservatives. At the same time, both men tolerated that their wives were liberals with do-gooder instincts to save the climate, save the whales, save humanity! Both men had decided that it wasn’t worth arguing, because most other things in their lives were so harmonious.
But sitting in front of the bank manager, who had just informed him that his wife’s best friend was a colossal fraud, a thief, and worthy of a felony conviction, Hank immediately took out his iPhone and looked up the numbers of his lawyer and his local police department, with the intention of having Irene (and possibly her husband Fred, as a co-conspirator) served with papers and then arrested and, he hoped, indicted and imprisoned.
Honey, on the other hand, started screaming at the bank manager. “How dare you accuse Irene of any wrongdoing? You are on a witch hunt. You have no proof!”
“Unfortunately, Honey, we have empirical proof,” Linc said, “all scrupulously documented on our computers, going back years, in fact decades.”
Skip to 2025
Is this scenario not exactly what Americans — and, for that matter, the entire world — have been witnessing in real time as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) discover the malfeasance, fraud, and criminality of not the fictional housewife Irene, but the real live people who run our massive government institutions? To name only a few, there are the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Pentagon, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). All of these have been fleecing our country — with our tax dollars — not of millions or billions, but of trillions of dollars!
In fact, DOGE has been unearthing the deep corruption involving both Republicans and (mostly) Democrats and proving the maxim that to unearth criminal behavior, always, always, always follow the money!
We have learned that our elected officials have sent vast fortunes to terrorist groups with eye-popping millions upon millions of dollars. And looky here:
Among other egregious examples of the kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE has been uncovering is that tens of millions of dead people are on our Social Security rolls, many of them children and people over 115 years old! And look what DOGE found — that $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were “almost impossible” to track. That is trillion, with a T!
DOGE has also found that California, New York, and Massachusetts, three deep-blue states — surprise, surprise! — were responsible for over half of the fraudulent unemployment claims in the United States since 2020, again involving massive mountains of money.
Enter the Pearl-Clutchers
OMG, bleat the perpetually sky-is-falling, glass-is-half-empty leftists. This is illegitimate! While, according to Victor Davis Hanson, Musk acts completely under executive authority.
Like Honey, they are shooting the messenger. That is understandable. After all, most of the criminality has been committed by the people they trusted, sent money to, voted for, based their entire belief systems on. Talk about an existential threat!
But unlike Honey, if it were their own personal bank accounts that were robbed, you can be sure they would be squarely in Hank’s camp, going after the crooks with the intention of bringing them to justice.
They remind me of a child having a temper tantrum in Aisle 4 of a supermarket — flailing arms, copious tears, kicking and screaming, crashing the cans and breakable jars off the shelf, simply because Mommy didn’t buy those all-important Animal Crackers.
“Clean-up in Aisle 4” is then blared over the loudspeaker.
That is what DOGE is all about: cleaning up the monumental financial mess that our greedy and corrupt elected officials and government agencies have inflicted on all of us.
Here is a way to keep track of the immense savings — and criminality — DOGE is uncovering every day. So far, literally billions — going on trillions — in fraud, waste and abuse.
May this grand effort to Make America Great — and financially solvent — Again continue unimpeded!
~~~
Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.
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