From the state that gave us Joe Biden we have this proud incompetent, who had been the Democrats’ chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.Why does the U.S. have a dangerous National Debt? People who think like Senator Coons. That is, badly.
During an interview yesterday on CNN, Michael Smerconish asked Coons about the DOGE revelations regarding USAID’s bizarre waste of funds and Trump’s determination to shut the agency down. Here was the Senator’s defense of spending $20 million to have “Sesame Street” broadcast in Iraq:
“This isn‘t just funding a kids’ show for children, millions of children in countries like Iraq,” Coons said. “It’s a show that helps teach values, helps teach public health, helps prevent kids from dying from dysentery and disease and helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS, extremism and terrorism. And to your point, it‘s pennies on the dollar. The U.S. Department of Defense has an annual budget of about $850 billion. USAID was spending about $30 billion. It is a small proportion of our total federal spending. And as [political scientist Joseph Nye] would often say, it‘s not just soft power, it‘s smart power.”
Smart. Wow. I hear Inigo calling…
The former Children’s Television Workshop, now called Sesame Workshop (SW), is in desperate straits because its HBO gig is over and it is no longer carried by PBS. The ridiculous 20 million taxpayer bucks USAID sends to Iraq of all places—Why not Zimbabwe? Why not Tierra del Fuego? Why not Antarctica?—is classic government waste for objectives that make dim members of the public say, “Awwwww!” It is impossible to ever cut government spending and address the snowballing debt with fools like Coons having any say in our budget and expenditures. It doesn’t help that so many Americans think “It’s Ok to waste X dollars because we waste so much more elsewhere.”
That “pennies on the dollar” argument, aka. “a drop in the bucket,” shows a disdain for mathematics (Enough drops, see, and you still get an overflowing bucket, Senator), and an addiction to rationalizations.”Hey, why pick on Iraq Sesame Street (‘Ahlan Simsim Iraq’) when its not our biggest dumb expenditure?” is just another version of the Worst Rationalization Ever, infamous #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things.”
Smerconish, who is supposed to be one of the smarter Axis broadcasters, didn’t even challenge Coons’ dumb argument. “Nye himself said, in the short term, hard power usually trumps soft power, but the long run effects might be the opposite. Or, as a caller to my Sirius XM radio program said yesterday, who would you rather teach Iraqi kids? Big Bird or al-Qaeda? Disease prevention helps us all, education that fights extremism,” Smerconish said, employing his usual smug certitude.
I would rather not teach Iraqi kids anything at all while American kids aren’t learning to read. But that’s just me…
After holding an online snap poll, Smerconish said that 72% of his viewers supported taxpayers funding of Big Bird in Iraq. (Uh, no, 72% of viewers foolish enough to respond to a CNN poll support that waste of money we don’t have.) “Now does that make it a better political issue than I said at the outset of the program? No, because I took five minutes to explain exactly what is that program in Iraq for ‘Sesame Street,’ teaching kids to wash their hands and not hate America,” Smerconish said. “And as I said to Chris Coons, you know, it‘s a soundbite world in which we‘re living, far easier to be dismissive and say, can you imagine they‘re spending all this money on fill in the blank, EV cars in Vietnam?”
A segment on CNN was actually valuable for once. Now we know that Coons is unquestionably an irresponsible idiot, we know a majority of voters in Delaware are dim bulbs to vote for him, we know Smerconish has been made stupid by bias, we know a significant percentage of his viewers throw spare change away because it is insignificant in comparison to their mortgage (and they pay for extended warranties because it’s just a little more money), we know why CNN is doomed, and we know why the United States now pays about $3 billion per day in interest on the National Debt.
The Coons interview also shows why DOGE is doing important work, why USAID is an unaccountable cash suck, and why the public is turning away from the Democratic Party.
Ethics Alarms 
“Enough drops, see, and you still get an overflowing bucket,”
My Dear late Father: “Paulie, a slow drip will fill a barrel overnight.”
PWS
In the Midwest, we let a small trickle come out of any faucets that are attached to a inside wall that also serves as an outside wall to the house to keep pipes from freezing during cold winters.
I keep my faucet only to a steady drop when that happens. If I don’t, the sink will overflow before morning and I refuse to waste that much water. As it is, the steady drop gets the water really close to the top of the sink.
These kinds of expenditures are things that private enterprise or a wealthy benefactor should be doing. You know why that isn’t happening? Because private enterprise knows that sending “Sesame Street”-esque programming to Iraq is a stupid idea that won’t move the needle on anything resembling meaningful ideological reform, much less garner any ROI.
So the government (in general) and USAID (in this specific case) have combined to become the dumping ground for all the ridiculous ideas that someone THOUGHT was good…but KNEW no one would pony up to pay for.
It’s disgusting.
…and what’s really terrifying?…this is the tippy-top of the tip of a gargantuan iceberg.
Again, I don’t think those ridiculous things happened. I think they are just paperwork covering for transfer of the money to leftist groups, prominent politicians, news organizations, etc. No one went to Beirut and spent $2 million promoting tourism there. That is the Disaster Tours business. The $2 million was funneled to some NGO with a board composed of Congress members, their family, or DNC staffers who were paid good salaries while they had some intern write a ridiculous report on their ‘work’ as the bulk of the money was filtered to some other left-wing cause under the ‘consulting’ line item.
Yep. And who really believes the Sanders and Warren only received donations from Big Pharma employees?
jvb
Yeah, you’re probably spot on. Money laundering at this scale doesn’t really seem possible, but it’s getting harder and harder to hide behind the old “that’s a conspiracy theory” curtain any longer.
We sent $600+ million to the Lutheran Church for ‘migrant services’. We gave more to the Catholic Church, we gave to the Methodists, the Episcopalians, etc. Why are our tax dollars funding religious charities? I mean, I support and am fully in favor of religious charities. However, that is why they are tax-exempt. Shouldn’t they be funding their charities themselves? I find it slightly annoying when the Catholics call up my church whenever a Project Gabriel person comes in. I mean, I don’t mind helping that person, they definitely need help, but shouldn’t the pope (sitting on his golden throne) be funding his OWN charities? Why does he expect other people to fund them while he crows about how much he is doing?
Also, why are we funding religious charities with taxpayer money to bring people into the country illegally? I mean, shouldn’t people go to jail over that? I know Biden made it ‘legal’ to bring people in against immigration laws, give them a SSN, and a work permit (the app gave them permission!), but still, they are actually breaking the law.
“It’s a show that helps teach values, helps teach public health, helps prevent kids from dying from dysentery and disease and helps push values like collaboration, peacefulness, cooperation in a society where the alternative is ISIS, extremism and terrorism.”
Then show us the content of the programming so we can validate the above statement.
Even if I accept the premise above collaboration and cooperation are heavily dependent on a unifying theme like hatred of Jews.
If collaboration and cooperation to promote peacefulness are values worth promoting why do Democrats and progressives push limited alliances here in this country to resist our elected leadership?
Furthermore, it is obvious that any such programming has proved to be ineffective and thus should be defunded and other options to deradicalize the young in the middle east.
I am reminded of when Fred Rogers addressed Congress about funding for PBS, and he gave an example of how his program introduced children to ways of understanding negative emotions like anger. I would not assume that Sesame Street doesn’t play a similar role in Iraq, but I would like more details on how we know it’s a good investment. Are there no programs in Iraq already that serve the same purpose?
EC
You wrote: “I would not assume that Sesame Street doesn’t play a similar role in Iraq, but I would like more details on how we know it’s a good investment.”
Because of the double negative I took that to mean that you assume that Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and Sesame Street are similar in nature.
I don’t think we can compare Mr. Rogers to Sesame Street. Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was a completely different animal than Sesame Street. In the former, you had a fatherly type helping children navigate conflicts as well as introducing them to different aspects of culture in a quiet one on one way. For many children he was the only father figure they knew.
Sesame Street typically introduces preschoolers to different things in almost an anime’ pace with changing vibrant colors with a cacophony of sound. The human element in Sesame Street was comprised of individuals with no discernable authority position. They came across as older siblings at best; with them being neither a mother nor father or other caretaker. In most cases the humans on the show interacted with Muppets or a special celebrity guest who took the limelight. The general focus was on the characters not the concepts trying to be taught.
Fred Rogers was good at what he did. He made a connection with the individual child. Mr. Rogers made the child viewer the center of attention. Sesame Street is more along the lines of trying to teach concepts while bombarding the child with visual and auditory candy in which the characters were created to be the center of attention and thus have the ability to generate revenues through product sales.
Thanks, Chris, that does help clarify the differences between the shows that would give us reason to believe that one may be more effective than another at helping children develop healthy values. I do remember Sesame Street having some social lessons (at least when I was growing up), but the interruptions from other skits would make that less efficient compared to Mister Rogers directly addressing the viewer.
A glance at Wikipedia shows that multiple children’s television channels exist in Iraq, so it does seem suspicious that someone decided they needed a subsidized version of Sesame Street.
Here is something that makes my blood boil, for more than one reason.
There was an op ed by Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) recently in the WSJ. She was saying that USAID has been a rogue agency for at least 20 years.
The website, usaspending.gov, was established after USAID refused to answer Congressional questions about what they were spending money on. This apparently was during Bush the younger’s administration. As I understand it Congress has required all agencies to post what they are spending money on to this web site.
Think about that for a moment. A U.S. government agency that just refuses to tell the U.S. Congress what they are spending money on? Doing it enough to get a bipartisan law passed to rein them in?
From what Ernst relates, that didn’t work. They continued to stonewall congressional inquiries and just refuse to answer.
When an agency gets to that point, it really does not matter what they are spending their money on (and I’ll make the point that it is our money, not theirs, that they are spending). Congress has the absolute right to check on how the money they appropriate is being spent.
But just the fact that they refuse to say is a solid indication that what they are doing will not survive the light of day. Like a vampire it will burst into flames when exposed to sunlight.
That is one thing. There is also the thought that I’m just now hearing about this from Ernst? Has she been silent or has she been effectively suppressed? That fact that I even ask that question is a sad commentary on where we are today.