Whenever I think of grifters, I get that classic image of an overconfident, self-destructive idiot racing across a river on the backs of alligators, certain that they won't stumble and lose a leg. See, for example, DJ Trump.

Or Boris Johnson.

1/

You know that grifter tactic of putting a scandal behind you by creating a bigger scandal? That's pure gator-dancing.

Grifters love debt - spending other peoples' money is Grifter 101. But it's not just money-debt - it's also policy debt.

2/

If you have a real problem and a fake solution, the real problem will continue to fester until it becomes so acute that you have a rupture, a default, a leg chewed off. The grifter way of dealing with this is blowing town before the rupture.

3/

The snake-oil salesman who prescribes alternating doses of speed and opioids to "cure your cancer" stays long enough to witness your stoned, energized delight and collect his fee, then gtfos before you enter metastasis and croak.

4/

The 4-5 year terms of Anglo-American elections are not a bad timeframe for this kind of grift. Reaganomics can produce a stock-market sugar rush and hectic roses on the economy's cheeks in that period, and then Ronny can toddle off to count his polyps before the bill is due.

5/

Some gators, though, have faster-than-average reflexes and can turn and take a leg before you can move on. Coronavirus, with its 3-week crisis cycles, is among the most intensely anti-grift adversaries that chancers like Trump and Bojo could encounter.

6/

"Everything's fine! Get drunk in an enclosed space while desperate, precarious, racialized people sharpen your fingernails and groom your fur! It will be fine!"

[3 weeks pass]

"Uh, we've always been pro-mask. Why the fuck are you in that bar? Personal responsibility!"

7/

The chancers have fed our lungs and our economy to the gators, by refusing to lock down and refusing to fund a stay-at-home order. Now, they're trying to figure out how to distract us from the sight of all those gators masticating our severed legs.

8/

Bojo's idea? A "New Deal."

That was FDR's plan to revitalize the economy after the Great Depression through extensive public spending that offered meaningful employment in the caring and infrastructure sectors, with generous arts and scholarship spending.

9/

Which would be pretty amazing! But Bojo's Made-in-Britain New Deal is just another grift.

FDR's New Deal accounted for FORTY PERCENT OF US GDP.

Boris's proposed spend is 0.2%.

Zero. Point. Two. Percent.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/04/boris-johnsons-new-deal-is-roosevelt-lite

10/

Grifters like to surround themselves with other grifters. Reagan had Nancy's astrologer. Boris has Dominic "Typhoid Dom" Cummings, who has his own back to the future plan: a Made-in-Britain ARPA (the US agency that created the internet, GPS, etc).

11/

This is how ARPA worked:

https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw 

A kind of autonomous, excellence-focused institution where advancement was based on skill, not aristocratic birth.

12/

It's impossible to imagine such an institution emerging from a Tory regime. The posh boys would fill the agency with inbred double-hairs in need of cushy resume-padding and an expense account. It wouldn't produce a new internet.

13/

It would produce a massive bar-tab and a long tail of sexual harassment claims.

eof/