The first time I went to Australia, I found myself without Life Savers. You know, those little rings of colored sugar that you either melted in your mouth (but also melted away the enamel of your teeth) or crunched and risked just breaking your teeth directly.

The hotel I stayed at had a curio shop and, look, rolls of colored sugar! So I bought one of the amber-covered rolls thinking it was butterscotch, headed out the door and popped one in my mouth. And spit it right back out.

That was not butterscotch! I’m not sure there was even sugar involved. So I looked more closely at the roll in my hand and discovered it was Musk-flavored Life Savers! Wasn’t musk the scent of my deodorant? If I wanted to put my deoderant stick in my mouth and bite off a piece, I didn’t need Life Savers, at all, just more deoderant.

I mention this because the orange-one that slithered his way into the White House seems to have brought with him a whole gang of Musk Life Savers. And the taste in the mouth of most Washington D.C. residents is now the same as I encountered in Sydney.

The super high-tech logic that’s so special that no one ever thought of it before and only the massive brain of Elon Musk is big enough to come up with—I’ll refute that thought in a moment—is basically this: cut everything you see, and if it was needed, just bring it back when someone points out that the patient is now dead.

This actually isn’t anything new. I saw this same terrible logic over and over in Silicon Valley. Hey, get rid of Steve Jobs, he wasn’t important, was he? Hey, get rid of Adam Osborne, his name isn’t on the company is it? Hey, throw away the operating system, because we can make a better one from scratch (Someday. With a lot of extra effort and buying a starter kit.)

It’s not even new for Elon Musk. His solution to make Twitter better? Delete seven letters and replace them with a meaningless one, fire most of the staff that made the thing work, shut down servers that may or may not have been needed, and sell check marks that don’t mean anything. Oh, and get rid of any form of reasonable moderation so that hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, and other terrible things can return as X's in place of useful tweets.

X is a good name for Twitter now, but it really should be written as two letters: Ex.

I’ve been convinced for a long time now that MAGA really stands for Make America Go Away. Musk Life Savers appear to be a very efficient way of making that happen.

Here’s a thought: maybe the folk that do most of the work for the US government were reasonably efficient and doing their jobs, after all. Maybe the real torrent of dollars down the drain that now shows up as federal debt was fraud from outsiders, tax avoidance by the rich, gaming the system (again by outsiders), and the jerrymandering of defense contracts so that everyone in Congress had to defend them.

If you want to find a deep state, you have to go no further than the Russell, Dirkson, Longworth, Rayburn, and Cannon buildings. If there’s something wrong with America, it started there and manifested itself in the US Capital building via both partisan and non-partisan voting where favors were granted and shared. And the folk that did that voting were themselves jerrymandered while Big Donors supported their campaigns at levels that even all the constituents making maximum level donations couldn’t match. America’s problems weren't the poor person trying to keep all the planes in the air, the disease specialists trying to figure out how to keep you from getting sick, or the folks trying to get you the Social Security or Medicare benefits you are owed.

No Lifes are being Saved with Musk. Like what I encountered in Sydney, he just leaves a foul taste in my mouth.