America distrusts its government more than during Watergate. Big win for Libertarians. Huge. The Kochs are at Burning Man right now, throwing a pig roast with truffles the size of Winnebagos. Wait, those are Winnebagos. Stuffed with drunken tricorn TParty asshats—
It isn’t so farfetched an image. The Beyond Bircher movement that is the TParty (that is the GOP’s self-invented Kryptonite) so delights in political pyrotechnics that the bonfire idea’s much more appropriate than Grover’s bathtub.
The Koch brothers delight in proving time and again how the lubricant of money will obligingly neutralize anything from Climate Science at the Smithsonian to an embarrassing documentary over at PBS. Ethics are so laughably fungible! Think tanks and eggheads can be bought for pennies a dozen and they figure the entire tattered American government is positioned for a fire sale in 2016—all’s they have to do is apply the petrol-accelerator and light matches in the right places.
The BBC clip’s timeline only goes back to Eisenhower—the modern peak of faith in government, after which it plummets like a gut-shot mountain goat. The only nominal hesitations were a couple economic upswings and 9-11; all else obeys a trajectory that Ike foretold with his parting speech, the infamous and still chilling prophesy of subjugation to men who worship at the altar of things that go boom.