And to that I might add:

In the process of this under-the-bus-throwing, our wonderful "conservatives" will get the "small(er) government" that they say they've been wanting -- but it won't look AT ALL like what they thought it would look like!

"Smaller government" will mean:

-- drastic cuts to social security and medicare,

-- drastic cuts to unemployment, workman's comp, food
stamps, and other essential support for keeping
people from slipping into destitution

-- crumbling infrastructure, power grid failures and
rolling blackouts, impassable roads, etc., etc.,
continually getting worse, for decades

-- failing services of all kinds, failing police
and fire support, rampant crime

-- closed schools, and an ignorant and dysfunctional
population (or MORE so than already exists);
rampant illiteracy

-- decimated or even non-existent middle class,

-- the return of something resembling medieval
feudalism, with the poor (formerly middle-class)
working as serfs for manorial lords

-- more or less everything spiralling downward.

THAT will be the fruit of your anti-big-government faux (Koch brothers) populism, you idiots! You'll GET your small government, all right. And it will be ugly as sin. You'll get smaller government in all the ways that will hurt you, and all the people around you.

If we really wanted smaller government -- as we should have, 50 and 75 years ago -- we would have insisted on NOT allowing the financially ruinous (as well as morally unsound) military/industrial/security complex to be built to begin with. We would have listened to the (WISE) authentic traditional conservatives who urged us NOT to engage in foreign wars. We would have had the sense NOT to create a global empire requiring a vast military and support structures to survive. We would NOT have allowed neo-cons to take over the government and foreign policy. We would NOT have allowed the development of a medical/industrial complex that costs per capita fully THRICE the health care costs of other developed nations. And so on. But we didn't. And now it is too late. Big Government is baked in the cake. To dismantle big government now is to dismantle the entire American way of life, because EVERYONE depends on big government. (Not that dismantling the American way of life is ultimately a bad thing; actually it is a good thing; but in the process it will be ugly.) To dismantle big government now (by "now" I mean over a short period, such as a single generation) is to precipitate a very nasty social and economic implosion, with all the features as on my bullet list above. Ugly as sin, for decades.

Theoretically, we could do it without that ugliness. We could make a collective decision to SLOWLY reduce big government, over many decades. Some intellectuals have suggested this over the years. Seymour Melman comes to mind. He was one of the best scholars of the military/industrial buildup, and he wrote often about the (long, slow) process of economic conversion, going from a permanent war economy to an economy of peace, and human and social development. But alas, no one listened. Everyone was busy spending their handsome paychecks on boats and cottages. And now it is too late.

Theoretically, we could do it without the ugliness, but we won't get the chance. Too late now. We've reached the end of the line. The rest of the world is fed up with us, and the rich fucks don't want to be bothered paying for our bloated "needs".

Of course, the rich fucks LOVE all this anti-big-government activism. Plays directly into their hands! Big government made them rich, but it also made all kinds of promises that they don't want to stick around and pay. So they'll take the riches and let us have our "small government", now. In fact, like the Koch brothers, they'll even devote a few $million (out of petty cash) to create astro-turf anti-big-government groups to pressure congress to dismantle the programs on which the country depends.

They'll take the riches, pack up and move East and South, just as they have been for decades; didn't you notice? All the factories and everything else moving to Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, etc.? They're leaving, and they won't be coming back for many decades, if ever. Why should they? They don't want to be stuck with the tab for your quadruple bypass operation.

Before this is over, you'll be on your knees BEGGING for big government to come back and make things like they were. But then it will be too late. It is already too late.