Trish Regan’s Diss Of US Postal Service Stamped 'Return To Sender'

The Postal Service is a public good, so of course conservatives hate it.

 Trish Regan, who was deemed too evil to continue working for Fox News, slapped around the US Postal Service Sunday with some tired rightwing talking points. We've heard this crap before: The post office is a big money-losing proposition and a clear example of government incompetence.

@trish_regan Right, that’s why they call it the United States Postal Business, that’s a very smart point you’re making.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@Kevin M. Kruse) 1597589811.0 

As any reasonably intelligent fifth grader could tell Regan, the post office is not a business. It's a constitutionally mandated federal service that cheaply and efficiently connects the entire nation. Its business model isn't outdated, like it's a manual typewriter company. Seniors and veterans, for instance, rely on the post office for delivery of vital prescription medication. Could FedEx and UPS replace the Postal Service? Sure, if you don't mind paying 20 times more for the same items and not receiving mail at all if you live in “unprofitable" areas. In-N-Out is a private business and can choose not to have locations in certain states. The Postal Service doesn't work that way. It serves everyone.

It's telling that conservatives claim the post office as a whole is a failure when if it was a private business, they would link its struggles directly to burdensome federal regulations. As Dok wrote when Trump first shot down congressional help for the USPS,

[The Postal Service has] been in difficult financial straits for the past couple decades, largely because in 2006 Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to prepay for both its retirement system and for healthcare for retirees — even for workers who haven't retired yet. That's a burden virtually no other company in the US has.

Republicans took the lead in hobbling the Postal Service, because while they consider most businesses too big too fail, they are desperate to see the Postal Service collapse.

Regan claims the post office is poorly run, even though I can still send a letter from Portland, Orego, to Portland, Maine, in a few days for less than a dollar. That's an operational miracle. She also doesn't call out by name Trump's postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who's actively sabotaging the Postal Service like a gangster milking the joint dry. You put a vegan PETA activist in charge of McDonald's and the bottom line's going to suffer.

DeJoy's daylight hit on the post office isn't a political winner. We might've thought Cliff Clavin was obnoxious, but according to a recent Pew Research Survey, 91 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Postal Service. That's significantly better than the 46 percent of Americans who tolerate ICE, which deserves to go out of business.

WATCH: I toured @USPS facilities across #WV today to thank our postal workers. People need their medicine, checks,… https://t.co/ZknlXjbYk5

— Senator Joe Manchin (@Senator Joe Manchin) 1597438963.0 

Democratic Senator from West Virginia Joe Manchin, hardly a radical socialist, released a moving video Friday defending the Postal Service as a vital American institution.

MANCHIN: In rural America, [the Postal Service] is the lifeline. It's where your medicine comes from, your checks come from. It's how you communicate with your family. We cannot get rid of the United States Postal Service, which is publicly owned, has been from the beginning, and shall be and continue to be for us to have a democracy and freedom. In rural America, we get left behind every time they want to do something they call “efficiency" and turn it to the private sector. I want the private sector to exceed and do well, but I understand they're gonna go where the returns are. And up in every little nook and cranny and every little small village that we have ... is not where they'e gonna go. The government has a responsibility to give those services to all people equally. That's what the postal service has always done and that's what it will always do if we protect them.

The president can't sell himself as the champion of working-class rural white America when he wants to gut the post office. Like Kamala Harris said, Trump wants to take everything he's inherited and run it into the ground. This includes our democracy itself, but we're not going to let him.

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