Dishonesty about the shutdown using commission and omission

With the shutdown, the media and the Deep State launch a subtle attack against Donald Trump by sneakily exonerating the Senate from responsibility.

Government shutdownOkay, I admit it. Saying James Comey is dishonest is pretty much like saying “dog bites man.” It’s no longer news. It’s simply the way the world – and Comey – works. Nevertheless, when you catch him in a special kind of lie that sees him attempting to play of his decades working for the federal government, you must call him out. Moreover, this particular lie is one that the dishonest media has been repeating ad nauseum.

The point of both the Comey and the media lie is to make it drill home that President Trump owns the shutdown and, by owning it, he is responsible for federal workers starving in the streets. And that’s how you end up with this Comey tweet from December 23:

Although the media hasn’t disseminated that precise tweet, it’s going heavy on the message about poor, starving federal workers.

Don Surber, however, exposes the lie:

First, they will be paid. The paychecks will be posted this week as usual. The pay period covered is before Congress shut down the government on December 21. Thus, the money was already appropriated by Congress.

Second, President Donald John Trump did not shut down the government. Congress did. Unlike previous government shutdowns, the president has not vetoed the budget because Congress has sent him nothing to veto.

Here are four more things to consider about those poor, pathetic federal workers: First, outside of the military, where people who put their lives on the line are very poorly compensated, thanks to excellent salaries and benefits, white-collar federal employees are compensated at a rate 47% higher than similarly situated private sector employees.

In other words, one would like to think that these employees can hang in there for at least a little longer as President Trump waits for the Senate to counter his offer to reduce the amount the House allocated for his national security barrier.

Second, thanks in no small part to JFK’s infamous Executive Order 10988 unionizing federal workers (a thank-you gift to the unions that helped, lawfully or not, put JFK over the top in the election), federal employees vote overwhelmingly for Democrats (as even the WaPo reluctantly conceded). In other words, Trump knows he’s not putting his base at risk with the shutdown.

Third, there’s the little fact that 86% of government spending is on autopilot, which means that only 14% of government programs need annual Congressional approval. Presumably, then, only 14% of government programs are affected by a shutdown and somewhere around that percent of employees will miss a paycheck.

Fourth, to the extent FBI employees are unfunded, maybe some of them will have a come to Jesus moment and figure out that their shenanigans – or their supervisors’ shenanigans – over the last three years have left a lot of Americans not giving a damn whether FBI agents get their paychecks. The corrupt ones don’t deserve them and the un-corrupt ones should either speak up or find other work.