Scandal and politics go hand in hand like Dylan Mulvaney and the world’s worst Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” impersonator. Some, like the Somali fraud in Minnesota, are pretty substantial. Others…well, let’s just say they’re fucking stupid and should be mocked.
This week, Secretary of War (because Secretary of Killing the Enemy and Breaking Their Shit was too long to put on a t-shirt) Pete Hegseth found himself at the center of a controversy over…and I wish I were making this up…surf and turf. Seems Pete’s been going on a spending spree to the tune of $93.4 billion, including $15.1 million on ribeyes, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, over $7.4 million a month on lobster tails, and other items ranging from Apple products to a piano.
Now, Leftists who normally wouldn’t give one-one-millionth of a shit about spending are up in arms about it! Of course, the usual suspects like Senator Adam “I’m the Love Child of a Human Woman and a Galapagos Tortoise” Schiff, Jasmine “Stacey Abrams 2.0” Crockett, and Adam “Temu Adam Schiff” Kinzinger rushed to social media to lambast the spending, calling it a waste of taxpayer funds from the Administration that gave us DOGE.
Guess which kind of scandal I’m putting Lobstergate in.
Lobstergate
What the Left thinks it means – a waste of money for extravagant luxury items
What it really means – an opportunity for the Left to take all the seats
When it comes to government spending, I’m very much like my idol and spirit animal Ron Swanson. Government is too damn big, so trimming the fat with a chainsaw seems like a good first step. Naturally, when I saw the price tag and what the money was being spent on, my first instinct was to complain. Then, my second instinct was to take a whiz because I had drunk a lot of adult beverages just an hour before.
Eventually, though, the rational side of my mind (or at least the side that can at least appear rational to the untrained eye) started looking into the specifics. I started with the steak because, well, steak. In September 2025, the Department of War spent $22 million on steak and lobster, which makes for one hell of a cookout.
Now, those who know a thing or two about financial matters might take note of the month where this money was spent. For those of you who don’t (or who are Leftists, which is pretty much the same thing), September marks the end of the fiscal year, which in government circles means spend as much as you can even if you’re not going to lose it if it isn’t spent. That adds some perspective to the Leftists’ bullshit.
And, as the MAGA Right will tell you, the steak and lobster didn’t go to Pistol-Packin’-Pete. It was given to…our military, as it has been done repeatedly in the past. Given the state of MREs (famously called Meals Refused by Ethiopians per the late great P. J. O’Rourke), I can excuse splurging on surf and turf because a famous man once said, “an army travels on its belly.”
And that man? You guessed it, Frank Stallone.
Aside from the steak and seafood, something else that caught my eye was the $98,329 grand piano. And that’s not all! Once you drill down to some of the more…bizarre expenditures, it gets harder and harder to justify.
Welcome to government accounting 101, where the budgets are made up and fiscal responsibility doesn’t matter.
And before you go off saying this reporting is from a Soros-funded think tank, I decided to take a closer look at the organization that reported on the extravagant spending under Hegseth’s watch, a little group the kids like to call Open the Books. To put it simply, they were DOGE before DOGE was a thing. Unless Uncle George has gone into funding fiscal conservative groups (which given what bullshit he’s thrown his money towards is highly unlikely), these are some of the “good guys.”
I’ve long been a proponent of reining in excessive and stupid spending, and Lobstergate has a mix of understandable yet excessive spending and drunken sailors on shore leave have more fiscal restraint spending. This is the nature of federal government for most of my life: spend now, figure it out later. Regardless of which major party holds the purse strings, we constantly find out about expensive toilet seats and promoting pineapple juice, but we never do anything about it as voters. Even when politicians tell us they want to cut spending, it never fucking happens.
A big part of this is the “spend it or lose it” mentality within the government. In order to justify spending more next year, bureaucrats and politicians find ways to spend money before the end of the fiscal year showing they really need all that extra money next year. After all, we can’t expect our fighting men and women to be at their best if we don’t spend billions of dollars on furniture, can we?
Actually, I’m pretty sure we can. Last time I checked, a credenza can’t shoot worth a shit. Maybe it’s because, well, it’s a piece of fucking furniture.
One of the things I will always go on record in criticizing with the Trump Administration is the number of unforced errors they make on the regular. This is one of them. And, yes, I know it’s business as usual in DC, but from the jump the current Trump Administration focused on cutting waste. Lobstergate doesn’t help that image and makes the President seem as two-faced as the Swamp creatures he ran against.
This almost gives the Left a W here. I say almost because they’re not much better at fiscal responsibility as Republicans have been in recent decades. In no way does it excuse the Right, but it puts their critiques into context. They’re just anti-Trump at this point, so even if he does something they approved in the past, it’s horrible.
Yeah, you’re not beating the charges of being flaming hypocrites anytime soon, kids.
And you should really take a seat. In fact, take all the seats. After the Obamacare debacle, you should never be considered credible by anyone with two working brain cells. I mean, you guys kept parroting Paul Krugman’s bullshit and he’s as reliable as Miss Cleo hooked up to a lie detector. You’re just not good at economics, and it shows.
Meanwhile, Lobstergate is more about government spending than it is about the Left/Right debate, mainly because both sides are horrible at staying within a budget, or passing one for that matter. The national debt is an ongoing concern, and reckless spending on last minute items isn’t the way to address it. Just ask anyone who racks up a huge credit card bill over the holidays.
Instead, let me propose an idea that’s worked everywhere it’s been tried: if you don’t need it, don’t spend money on it. Sure, you may lose money next fiscal year because you didn’t use up everything you received this year, but when the national debt is higher than Hunter Biden at Crack-A-Palooza, it’s more important to make the money stretch farther than to secure more money for grand pianos and Sesame Street in Iraq.
Trust the free market on this, kids. If there’s a need, it will be filled as soon as someone finds a way to make money off it. And I’m not talking Congresscritters here. If there is a demand for a good or service, government doesn’t have to step in and fill it; a smart businessperson will step up and do it. Then, he or she will have to pay taxes on that investment, so you’ll get your money, just not deposited directly into your pockets like you normally get it. Government intervention in creating demand never works out well in the end, especially when you consider most politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t know a ROI from a DUI.
The difference? Government types get a lot more of the latter on our tax dollars than they do the former.
_______________________________________________
Follow this blog on Mastodon or the Fediverse to receive updates directly in your feed.
a Blog about Faith, Politics, Technology, and everything.
Fediverse Followers
