On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher closed his show by stating that there is a deep state consisting of “the bureaucratic class that justifies its existence by making up new rules” and that the bureaucratic class is a group of “petty tyrants” that make it impossible to do things people want done.
Maher said, “It’s time to admit that here in America, there really is such a thing as the deep state, but it’s not the one MAGA nation is freaked out about. The FBI is not a bunch of closet radicals, it’s a bunch of guys who iron their underwear. Washington is a city full of big, stone buildings full of bureaucrats, but they’re not plotting against real Americans. They’re issuing passports, cutting Social Security checks, running the Census, updating maps, buying bullets for Ukraine, inspecting dog food, ordering blue plastic gloves for the TSA, and measuring the methane in cow farts.”
He continued, “But there is a deep state, which is the bureaucratic class that justifies its existence by making up new rules…it’s the vast network of regulators, administrators, inspectors, contract reviewers, project managers, fee [assessors], special commissioners, zoning officers, and consultants whose jobs seem to be to make sure nothing ever happens and then charge you for it. The people who answer the phone, permit office, how may I hinder you? 15% of workers in America work for the government, that’s 24 million people, with one shared vision: to fine you if your mailbox is too big. They say a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, but it could also be a liberal who just got cockblocked trying to remodel a porch…or got a parking ticket because their car was facing out instead of in.”
Maher further stated, “Last year, Wyoming began construction on the largest wind farm in North America, that will power two million homes in Arizona, Nevada, and California. And to think, it only took 18 years, not to build it, to approve it. 18, backlogged, knuckle-dragging, pencil-pushing, thumb-[twiddling], ball-scratching years to finally get to yes. When they started doing the paperwork, Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend wasn’t even born. And how ironic, with all the talk about the urgency of switching to green energy, our deep state of petty tyrants wasted almost two decades on permitting and nitpicking over the environmental impacts and social effects of the very thing that would most positively impact the environment. … The enemy [of] clean air isn’t just big oil, it’s big permitting. It’s not that America isn’t able to get anything done, it’s that we’re not allowed to.”
He added, “Of course there should be consideration of the environment on everything we build, but, as so often happens on the left, they seem to have no ability to recognize when they’ve taken a concept way too far, and are, in fact, hurting their own cause. America has become Gulliver, the giant that got tied down with a thousand tiny ropes by Lilliputians, the horde of little people who do big damage. Build Back Better, sounds good, so does shovel-ready jobs. … As Barack Obama once said, one of the biggest lessons he learned as president was, ‘there is no such thing as shovel-ready projects.‘ Environmental impact statements used to be a few pages long, now they’re thousands of pages of legalistic nonsense and take an average of 4.5 years to complete, with thousands of bureaucrats filling out millions of paper forms that kill hundreds of forests to answer the question, is this good for the environment?”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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