Meet the new boss—same as the old boss—lyrics of wisdom from 1971.

There's nothing in the street/Looks any different to me/And the slogans are effaced, by-the-bye

I had an awful WORDLE week—five consecutive 5s, including a misspelling!

I must owe something to the language. How about sharing a somewhat forgotten word?

Arrogate.

I never use it—expropriate is usually good enough (I never use that very much either). Still, we need a language to counter the MAGAish that seems to dominate the political landscape. And arrogate: to take without justification—is perfect.

And what has MAGA arrogated? Our peace of mind, our democracy, and our ideals as a nation, for starters. But also, they have stolen and exploited words and phrases they neither know nor understand (or, in some cases, can spell.) Let's take them back, and let's start with deep state.

O-o-o-o-h. deep state. Isn't that a scary term like Melania and bigly?

Well, no. As the Who said decades ago—same as the old boss It's just the decades-old Republican fantasy to explain why nobody can stand them—not their policies, their attitudes, their religious hypocrisy, or their candidates. It's the childish "Nobody likes me" ploy that most kids eventually grow out of when they realize that it's true—nobody likes them—and so they change. The Republicans never changed, but just grew more and more tedious until they unearthed the worst possible human being available and ran him for president. In an unaware and increasingly conspiratorial electorate, he developed the "Deep State" into some monolithic monster hell-bent on destroying us all. And the MAGA people sucked it up. 

And we, who should have known better, let it happen.

So what constitutes this fearsome deep-state cabal that arouses so much fear in MAGAts that they entrust their future to a convicted felon? Well, it's your letter carrier, the librarian, the cop who lives next door, the aid worker distributing food to disaster victims in North Carolina, the FBI agents who thwart a terrorist attack, the Secret Service agents who protect the president and his staff, the FEMA workers finding shelter for victims of disasters, our ambassadors working in hostile environments to ensure our awareness of events that affect us in the global community, and more. They inspect our roads and bridges, make sure our dams hold, maintain our national parks, and despite some recent exceptions, keep our airways safe. Not that scary.

Once you realize what the deep state comprises, you realize that Trump's purge is merely a replacement of competency with incompetency—maybe with a letter carrier who can't read numbers, a librarian who hates books, a FEMA worker with agoraphobia, RFK Jr.—the Trumpian cast of bunglers and charlatans is filling up at a rapid pace while the Muskian creep-state is contaminating the rest. It'll be a stupid and incompetent deep state, but a deep state nonetheless...like when Trump drained the swamp and refilled it with wastewater.

So, let's take back the phrase. Does he want Gulf of America? Good. A deep state is one more thing we can laugh at. And when you hear the names of pretenders like Hegseth, Patel, Bondi, Vought, Kennedy, Gabbard, and others, start calling them what they are—the new deep state—laughable and inept, but noxious and dangerous.

And then let's accept Trump's advice about the deep state and work like hell to eliminate it.

Happy arrogating!