California Dem Ro Khanna Wants To Be Elon Musk's Best Friend

That's not how you do 'progressive.'

Now that Tulsi Gabbard has returned to her natural home in the party of Putin-lovin’ suck-ups and earned a Cabinet nomination out of the switch, we are taking bets on who will be the next Democrat to go full Tulsi in a desperate attempt to look broad-minded for reasons we cannot fathom.

Ha ha, no we are not, because the answer is Ro Khanna, it has been Ro Khanna, it will be Ro Khanna right up to the moment that he finally stops living a lie and admits he’s a sucker.

Khanna is patting himself all over his back for his willingness to work on helping identify potential budget cuts with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s make-work Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, for anyone whose brain has been Internet-poisoned as badly as those two:

Our considered opinion is that no one, absolutely no one, especially no member of the Democratic Party, should be lending one iota of credibility to DOGE, even if you agree that our military budget could stand some trimming.

Though you better have some ideas of what to replace that spending with, because the military and its needs keep a lot of Americans employed, from the top brass at the Pentagon to the exotic dancers at every strip club within twenty miles of a military base. Saying “We’re cutting out waste and fraud” and “all these fired federal employees will simply shift to the private sector” will not automatically help create jobs in the private sector. It certain will not put dollar bills into those g-strings.

We mention this because while we are fine — really fine! — with lower military spending, we don’t think Khanna and his new nitwit friends have actually thought any of this through. And neither do people who actually have to make these decisions for a living, and boy is he huffy about it:

Anyway, DOGE is not an actual department. It is an advisory committee with zero powers other than making recommendations for spending cuts that will be ignored and maybe grifting a few catered meals in the executive suites of various government department headquarters around Washington under the guise of “working lunches.” We’re fairly sure convicted felon Donald Trump’s handlers gave Musk and Ramaswamy this task in order to keep those two annoying try-hards busy and as far away from the White House as they could.

Seriously, would you want to spend more than five seconds in the presence of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy? Trump and his people might be virulent bigoted sociopaths with the most unpleasant personalities on Earth and moral compasses that would make the Mongols squeamish, but even they must have their limits. And these are people who are going to voluntarily go into an office with Stephen Miller every working day of their lives for the next four years.

About the only thing DOGE is good at doing in the weeks since Trump announced its formation is drumming up publicity for itself and its two leaders. Musk and Ramaswamy’s promises to cut $2 trillion in spending from the American government’s $6 trillion budget is so ridiculous that it hardly bears mentioning. Especially when you see some of the cuts they have floated. The VA’s entire health care budget? The entire National Institute of Health? Head Start?

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You can tell how ridiculous the ideas are because Republicans have been floating “end teleworking for federal employees” as some sort of giant step in the right direction. The GOP touts the fact that “underutilized government office space” is costing around $81 million a year. That’s .000013 percent of the $6 trillion in spending that DOGE promises to slice into. Hooray, you’re .000013 percent of the way there

So some of these ideas are gaining traction with Republicans on Capitol Hill. And also with Ro Khanna, who is heading into his fifth term in the House of Representatives and apparently has yet to learn that even the most gung-ho GOP spending cutter will flinch the minute he learns any cuts might mean job losses in his district.

But Khanna thinks he knows better, because his tweet about working with DOGE got a lot of views on X or Twitter or eXTwitter or whatever we’re calling it this week:

That number was up to over 32 million by the time we started writing this on Friday afternoon, so Lord only knows what self-satisfied garbage Khanna is telling himself right now about his own bravery.

But! To get your ego pumped up over this, you have to a) trust views data from X, which we would not recommend doing because it is very much in X’s interest to lie and inflate those numbers and b) recognize that Elon Musk quote-tweeted you, he has over 200 million followers, and the company has, on his orders, tweaked the algorithm so that his posts show up at the top of everyone’s feeds. Plus, considering the majority of X’s user base these days, congrats, most of those 23 million views came from either bots, or from conservatives and Nazis (but we repeat ourselves) who already agree with you.

In other words, X is most assuredly not real life. It is a right-wing website run by a lying dirtball and with zero transparency into its traffic numbers. Why are you, Ro Khanna, a self-described progressive, taking it seriously? Why are you legitimizing it in any way? Are you still wondering why no other Democrats might want to sit with you in the cafeteria at lunch? Because we have some ideas!

Khanna also retweeted a Bernie Sanders post seemingly agreeing with Elon Musk that administrative costs for healthcare are too high, and the American people deserve better. But you’d have to actually be able to read words to see that Bernie Sanders isn’t Team Musk here.

Yes, administrative costs in our healthcare system are too high because of insurance companies. Some sort of Medicare for all single-payer system would likely reduce administrative costs to something approaching that of other countries with single payer. Which is one of multiple reasons why Sanders is advocating for it in that post!

But Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are not pushing for government-provided healthcare. In addition to the aforementioned cuts for veterans’ care, they are also talking about cutting Medicare and Medicaid, as conservatives have long wanted to do.

In other words, there is no — we repeat, no, none, zero, zilch, nada, nil — intersection of interests here between Bernie Sanders and the DOGE guys (or DOGEbags, as various BlueSky wags have been referring to them). And certainly the rest of the GOP isn’t signing onto universal healthcare.

So what fucking point do you think you are making here, Ro Khanna?

People should know by now not to give Donald Trump an inch or he’ll take ten miles, and it would really behoove everyone in the opposition party to get that through their noggins.

[The Hill / CNBC]

Are you the federal government? We will happily take some of your money to stay employed! Even if you’re not the federal government.