Let Them Eat Crab!

But sure, tell me again about “waste, fraud, and abuse

Photo credit TMZ

Anyone who knows me knows I love seafood in a way that probably requires a small medical chart and a priest.

My dad used to eat the shells. I’m not kidding. Whole lobster legs. Shells, joints, the little crunchy cartilage bits that look like they belong in a museum exhibit about prehistoric shrimp. He’d sit there casually crunching lobster legs like a man eating sunflower seeds while the rest of us watched in the horrified silence usually reserved for discovering a relative can unhinge their jaw like a python.

My kids inherited it.

They fight over the legs now. They snap them off and eat them whole like tiny calcium breadsticks. They fight over the green lobster guts too. Tamale, roe, sea sludge, radioactive ocean guacamole, whatever the hell marine biologists call it, they’re elbowing each other for it like it’s the last Capri Sun in the cooler in the middle of a July Little League triple-header when the ice is half melted and every kid within a ten-mile radius is circling that cooler like sharks.

I’m right there with them.

Hand it over. All of it.

At this point I’m basically a suburban orca with a Costco membership.

And if lobster is on the table there is a splash zone. Like the first three rows at an aquarium show. There’s a perimeter. Butter droplets travel. Lobster legs ricochet. Someone inevitably launches a claw across the table like a tiny red javelin. Trust me, you do not want to be sitting inside the splash zone when my kids and I get our hands on a crab bucket unless you enjoy garlic butter and shell fragments arriving at high velocity like seafood confetti.

But even I — a woman who will happily eat a lobster like a harbor seal with a mortgage — had to stop and stare when I saw the receipt.

Two million dollars in Alaskan king crab.

In one month.

That’s not dinner. That’s a goddamn crustacean shipping lane, a butter-slick seafood superhighway stretching straight from Alaska to some Pentagon dipshit’s cholesterol medication.

And the crab was just the appetizer.

Because apparently someone inside the defense bureaucracy decided the best way to close out the fiscal year was to recreate the seafood tower from a cocaine-fueled billionaire yacht party — the kind where someone is yelling about sanctions while a lobster tail is being aggressively violated with a butter knife — except with missile launch codes nearby.

They spent $6.9 million on lobster tail.

$15.1 million on ribeye steak.

$1 million on salmon.

At this point the defense budget reads less like national security and more like someone handed the federal credit card to a pack of champagne-marinated shitlords and told them Red Lobster was a matter of strategic importance.

Then there’s the ice-cream situation.

$124,000 on ice-cream machines.

Because apparently global military planning now requires the same equipment as a deeply cursed Dairy Queen staffed entirely by sleep-deprived teenagers and one screaming manager named Todd who smells like waffle cones and poor decisions.

And then there’s the item that made me stop and reread the report like I’d accidentally licked a nine-volt battery.

Fruit basket stands.

Not fruit.

Not fruit baskets.

Fruit basket stands.

Twelve thousand dollars’ worth.

What the fuck is a fruit basket stand?

Is it a pineapple throne? A banana balcony? Some kind of chrome-plated cantaloupe catwalk where a melon can sit there feeling glamorous while the rest of us bankroll it like a nation of butter-funding chucklefucks?

Did someone inside the national security apparatus accidentally open a Williams-Sonoma display table next to the briefing room?

I’m just imagining a four-star general standing in front of a polished pineapple pedestal that looks suspiciously like the centerpiece from the world’s most enthusiastic swingers’ brunch while someone from accounting whispers, “Sir, the mango display really ties the room together.”

And honestly if that doesn’t explain the values of this entire regime I don’t know what does.

At this point the federal government is basically Marie Antoinette in camouflage leaning out of a palace window yelling “Let them eat crab!” while the rest of the country stands outside holding medical bills and wondering why the decorative fruit budget has a better lobbyist than pediatric oncology.

And look, I’m trying not to be shellfish about it, (sorry not sorry) but it’s hard not to notice the pattern here.

Because the same people presiding over this surf-and-turf fever dream are on television screaming about welfare fraud.

They will look you dead in the eye and tell you the real problem with the federal budget is a single mom buying groceries with SNAP.

They will tell you immigrants are draining the system.

They will tell you feeding hungry children is too expensive.

Last year the Trump regime literally went all the way to the United States Supreme Court to block food assistance for hungry kids.

They shut down the government to stop Americans from getting tax extensions on their healthcare.

That’s how far they were willing to go to prevent people from getting help.

But apparently two million dollars of king crab in one month is just part of the cost of “defending freedom.”

And here’s the thing that really scrambles your brain like eggs on a truck-stop griddle.

The same people apparently converting the defense budget into the world’s most expensive surf-and-turf buffet are the exact same people making decisions about the actual war.

The military has confirmed it was our Tomahawk missile that struck a girls’ school in Iran.

That strike killed nearly 175 school children.

Hundreds of American service members were badly injured in the opening days of this conflict — burns, shrapnel wounds, traumatic brain injuries — and this White House hasn’t even bothered to mention it.

Not once.

Meanwhile somewhere in Washington there’s a guy named Gary from procurement sitting in wrinkle-free khakis absolutely obliterating a lobster tail like a man who thinks the national debt is a dipping sauce and the American taxpayer is the complimentary bread basket.

Groceries cost more.

Healthcare costs more.

Housing costs more.

Meanwhile this is what they’re doing with billions of dollars of our money.

Crab legs.

Lobster tail.

Ribeye steak.

Ice-cream machines.

A ninety-eight-thousand-dollar piano.

And a decorative mango throne.

A bunch of sanctimonious shellfish-stuffing shitweasels lecturing the rest of us about fiscal responsibility.

Because budgets are values.

What you spend money on is what you care about.

Kids with cancer didn’t make the list.

Homeless veterans didn’t make the list.

Hungry children didn’t make the list.

But the crab did.

Marie Antoinette had cake.

These assholes have crab.

But yeah — please.

Tell me more about waste, fraud, and abuse, won’t you.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

I am so, so grateful for all of you!

Stay safe, stay san(ish), and stay strong!

💙 Jo