A little political lesson from Wile E. Coyote | Whale’s Tales

In a series of rules that Wile E. Coyote’s creator, Chuck Jones, laid down in 1948 to guide Warner Brothers’ stable of animators and writers, he directed that the coyote’s greatest enemy should not be the Road Runner, anvils, dynamite detonators or other ACME products.

“Whenever possible,” Jones wrote, “it should be gravity.”

Curious thing about gravity in Wile E. Coyote’s world: it doesn’t become a threat until he notices there’s no longer anything under his feet. At that moment, he pulls the “uh oh” sign out of — I don’t know where— and falls. Too late.

Lately, I’ve had a hard time shaking that image.

I liken the coyote to people who are cheering on the present administration’s clumsy and brutal dismantling of the federal government. And I wonder, how long until supporters look down and see nothing under their feet? Too late. And unfortunately, they’ll take the rest of us down with them.

In the meantime, while the pending disaster sleeps in its causes, supporters of the administration labels any objector “a traitor,” a “communist,” or an “evil lib.”

So let me say it as plainly as I can: in the United States criticism of our leaders is not treason nor does it constitute a lack of patriotism.

Don’t believe me? Consider what President Teddy Roosevelt said more than 100 years ago:

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

Roosevelt’s words are even more trenchant today.

So, as a patriotic American, here exercising my right as a free man to say to power: I say: ‘Yes, it’s a laudable goal to cut spending. It needs to be done. We all want that. What I object to is the clumsy, gormless, insulting, damaging, brutal they are going about it. They bring the meat cleaver when they should bring the scalpel.

We’ve all seen the resulting missteps. Just last week, the administration fired a number o federal employees, only to do an about-face days later and try to hire them back, upon learning just what those men and women were doing for all of us. Turns out, they were guarding the nation’s nuclear stockpile, which is, you know, kind of important

What does that mistake say, if not, “We don’t need to understand what we are doing, or whom we hurt doing it. None of that matters! We’re saving money!”

The above is just one of many examples illustrating what happens with monumental tasks. when we fail do even a nanosquat of research ahead of time. If DOGE cared at all about “wasteful spending,” Musk would have summoned forensic accountants to the complicated work But what did we get instead? Late teen, early 20-something tech bros doing work without fully mature frontal lobes.

I don’t buy the comments I am reading from the administration’s defenders who say: “Americans voted for this by the greatest landslide in our nation’s history, so suck it up.”

First of all, there are wrong ways to do a thing, and this one of them. I don’t believe the people voted this administration in knew about the ham-fisted methods it would use to accomplish its goals. And the election did not demonstrate the greatest landslide in the nation’s history.

Among this administration’s darkest, most insidious efforts is its push to weaken, or eliminate, all watchdogs on government until it gets loyalists in there, to name only a few of its targets. There’s the free press, the Inspectors General, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the FBI — indeed, all agencies that aim to to protect us from fraud, corruption and deceit.

We all know that our founders, in particular Thomas Jefferson, supported a vigorous free press to act as a watchdog on government, not one that parrots any administration’s line. Last week, Associated Press reporters were barred from a news conference because the AP wouldn’t call what for more than 400 years had been “The Gulf of Mexico,” “The Gulf of America.”

Why do this? I can’t find another explanation except this: when little Frankie sets forth to plunder the cookie jar, he doesn’t want anyone to see what he’s up to,. And the best way for nefarious people to do their work, and to thrive in so doing, is to cloak it.

I once read what a very wise fellow said of certain malefactors: “They love the darkness because their deeds are evil.”

We know our nation’s founders wanted no part of tyranny and didn’t want any future leader vested with the absolute power. So they split the powers then vested in King George III into three co-equal branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.

But certain types cannot abide by this idea of divided powers. They want to concentrate all of it in one person’s hands. So, they are making war on co-equal branches of government to make them subservient to the executive power. Even the judiciary. Doing things in this way lays an axe to our nation’s founding ideas. And what could be more antithetical to our constitutional republic than that?

We’ve all heard justifications changing from minute to minute. An executive order comes out, and instantly the Leader of the House of Representatives tells judges to take their hands off the President’s agenda. Then supporters go about trying convince us all that that’s the way it’s always been done.

No, it has not. That is a lie. The current approach, alloyed with an abiding lust for revenge, and settling of scores will not fix things.. I’ve always believed that hatred makes bad policy. And so does mindlessly sawing away the floor under our feet, until …

In the words of Wile E. Coyote: “Uh, oh!”

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.