The latest depth of corruption and depravity is the deliberate vandalism of the US Postal Service. The Cheeto Demon isn't even pretending to hide his motives, openly acknowledging that he's doing it to undermine attempts to vote against him.
The GOP's paper-thin rationale is that the Post Office isn't making money. It's an argument that would reek in the nostrils of anyone who still possessed a sense of smell. For starters, the Post Office actually was making money until the Republican-run government during the reign of George II decided that it needed to fully fund retirement for hypothetical workers who haven't even been born yet.
More fundamentally, the Post Office isn't supposed to make money. It's a government service. Taxpayers pay money and they get a service in return. Literally nobody has ever griped that the Pentagon loses $750 billion a year. We pay for defense. We get defended. We can easily argue that it costs too much, but it doesn't make any sense to slam it for not being profitable. It isn't supposed to be.
But maybe we're looking at it the wrong way. Our sacred founding fathers looked to ancient Rome for inspiration when framing our system of government. Beginning in the republic and obviously continuing in the imperial period, Roman politicians were never shy about amassing great personal wealth by using the legions to loot non-Roman lands and enslave non-Roman people.
Our government has never been shy about using our military to safeguard and even advance private financial interests abroad. But we've never used our Army and Navy to do an old school Roman invasion, conquering with military might and then stealing everything that isn't nailed down and slaughtering or enslaving everyone who resists.
Maybe we should revive this proud tradition. Seems like other countries might have stuff we could take from them. Slavery's technically illegal in US territory, so I guess we'd just have to set up massive systems of privatized prisons for the local population.
It couldn't make our international reputation much worse than it already is.
Image credit: detail of Trajan's Column, from Wikimedia Commons
