We all know that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber has filled his cabinet with the worst people that he could find whether they were qualified for the position or not. These people are money grubbing psychopaths who were at the tops of their industries with neither experience in government or policy, and they are hostile to the role the federal government played in their industry.

A particularly despicable example is Steve Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury. You might recall Mnuchin from his sordid, shabby, scurvious adventure at OneWest Bank where he and some co-investors, which included George Soros, by the by, bought a failed real estate “loan” company for pennies on the assets. The FDIC took all the financial risk by guaranteeing the investors’ investments — a completely legal sweetheart deal devised to rescue the economy from the pit that Mnuchin’s former employer, Goldman Sacks and others, had attempted to bury it. They foreclosed and sold as quickly as they could even using illegal methods like robo-signing foreclosures. In short, he was a major corporate welfare recipient.

The Brouhaha

His new bride, Louise Linton, flaunted all that corporate welfare all over the American middle class in a famous social media brouhaha that started on Instagram. I’m sure you’ve heard of it — if not, I hope you continue recovering from your coma, unless you really are recovering from a coma, and then I sincerely and not-so-snarkily hope you continue recovering — by now. It’s been all the rage. Let’s quickly recap.

On 21 August, she and hubby decided to take a quick trip to Fort Knox on the tax payer dime to do some “official business” and, you know, since they were there, observe the eclipse from atop aforementioned Fort Knox and feel the sexy tingle that only greedy bastards to the proportions that Mnuchin has reached can feel when standing atop ALL THAT GOLD!

Of course, such an outing must be socially mediated, so Louise posted a picture of the happy couple deplaning from the US government plane and tagged herself with all of her designer designed crap because classy, amirite?

It didn’t take long for the social media machine to supply some responses and in this day-and-age of repulsion of all things Pussy Grabber, one Ms jennimiller29, gave voice to the repulsion one feels when a vile invertebrate like Mnuchin and his bride slither out from under their rock, Glad we could pay for your little getaway #Deplorable. Pretty mild really given the events of this hot August. But, it was the pea under the stacked mattress of Princess Linton, and it just couldn’t be ignored! Linton pinned a swift and sure mocking and shockingly personal reply:

From Wonkette

Bless her heart.

The choicer lines:

Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country? I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day ‘trip’ than you did.

Self-sacrifice? Whoa! Given that most of the super wealthy don’t even bother to file or pay taxes — please note all of the Obama cabinet and higher admin officials who had to withdraw once the Repubes brought up their tax problems for evidence of the lack of tax honesty in the upper echelon of wealth — and that she’s only been married to the billionaire since June. Self-sacrifice? What the fuck has she ever sacrificed by choice? I guess she puts out for the monster once in a while as part of their pre-nup… I’d guess and allegedly, everybody is saying it, the best people, really, believe me, so maybe she is right. Maybe she is willing to sacrifice more of herself than any one of us are to get to be Mrs. Corporate Welfare Queen and take the government flight so hubby can “negotiate” with Mitch and, coincidence, bonus, and win-win, they can go atop ALL THAT GOLD and watch the eclipse of the sun. Not the purpose of the trip, really. Not at all.

You’re adorably out of touch.

Sweet. Reminds me of the time that Poppy Bush was AMAZED by the bar code scanner at the grocery store during his losing presidential campaign. Yeah. Clean up on aisle 4! Sarcasm clean up on aisle 4.

Your kids look very cute. Your life looks cute. I know you’re mad but deep down you’re really nice and so am I. Sending me passive aggressive Instagram comments isn’t going to make life feel better.

Your life looks cute. Is there any more passive-aggressive way of saying, Ha! Ha! to someone. I mean the mean just drips off that line, don’t it?

Go chill out and watch the new game of thrones (sic). It’s fab!

The Game of Thrones reference is to establish her hunanity street cred because nothing puts the hun in hunanity like The Game of Thrones. She’s just one of us… isn’t that adorable?

These two soul-devouring pit vipers deserve each other, but sweet dirty-diapered Jesus didn’t they teach you better about how to treat the peons on social media at how-to-be-a-corporate-welfare-queen-bitch school? You think they would. Or were you just out shopping for #designer apparel that day?

Kinda puts a whole new impetus behind, Eat the rich, don’t it? Not that we here at Ye Olde Blogge actually condone violence against real people or wish harm on anyone.

Ms jennimiller29 has replied with a well-written and evenly measured fuck off. You’re welcome to read it. In the parlance of today’s headline writers, it was powerful.

My purpose in bringing up this ridiculously sordid affair is to examine the “motivations?” of Mrs. Corporate Welfare Queen there because the world of psychology has some interesting shit about how we perceive the actions, motivations, and behaviors of others and ourselves.

The Superiority Illusion

Very few us run around thinking that we’re better than everyone else and look cross our long narrow nares at the rest of humanity or should I say, hunanity? (Man, I just crack myself up sometimes!) But, most of us think things like, I’m a better than average driver. Or, I walk better than most people. Or, Look! I’m walking and chewing gum! Oh, god! Now, I’m choking…

In fact, if you were to stop a hundred people and ask each one about some randomly selected quality, the majority would opine that they did it better than most other people. Not the best mind you, but better. It wouldn’t matter which randomly selected quality or behavior you chose, most people will just assume that they do it better. It’s a science fact!

Here’s the trick: No one looks at all of the behaviors and thinks, I do all these things better than most, so I’m a pretty fucking fine human being, so why ain’t I getting laid more often? Okay, most of us do wonder about why we ain’t getting laid more often… But, when something focuses your attention on some behavior, many of us will go to the I do it better than most routine.

I reckon Ms Corporate Welfare Queen there just is better than the rest of us at thinking she is better than the rest of us after all look at all the taxes they’ve dodged and all the corporate welfare they’ve grabbed with both hands and all the sacrificing for the good of the country they’ve done! Somebody had to take the houses from all those people who got behind on their mortgages and resell them!

Social Media, Perceptions, & Errors in Judgement

There’s two things that make up part of the secret language of psychology, correspondence bias or fundamental attribution error. They are similar kinda like two ass cheeks separated by a thong. For our purposes, we’ll just ogle one ass cheek and pretend like it’s both.

Correspondence bias is the tendency for people to attribute the positive qualities observed in others (especially those people whom we don’t know well) to personality characteristics rather than attributing them to reactions to situations. This tendency is especially pronounced on social media like Facing all the Books and Gramming all the Instants, and it may have played a role in the unfortunate shooting of her own dick that Mrs. Corporate Welfare Queen accomplished.

It works like this: Ms jennimiller29 smarts off at Mrs. Corporate Welfare Queen for being all of the deplorables that she so obviously is. I mean, who hashtags all of their designer gear? TACKY. But, Linton reads it and assumes that it is just Ms jennimiller29’s personality shining through, and, that, clearly, someone with such poor manners that they would point out that their little eclipse watching outing atop ALL THAT GOLD was thinly disguised as gubment work needs to be put in her place. Who did Ms jennimiller29 think she was talking to? A common Corporate Welfare Queen? I mean, she’s a queen, ain’t she? Don’t that count for nuthin nowadays?

For her part, Ms jennimiller29 read the tacky post, saw through the flim-flamsy gauzy veil covering their eclipse-watching outing. and assumed it was due to the Corporate Welfare Queen grabbing corporate welfare with both hands and not just brazenly taking shameless advantage of an opportunity. It was her #deplorable personality causing her to post such a tacky thing and not the dizzying situation of having watched the eclipse atop ALL THAT GOLD!

Social media just causes you to assume that all the people you don’t know in RL are happier and doing better, but not necessarily deservedly so, than you are. It’s kinda like all those guys whacking it to porn assuming everyone else is having A LOT more casual sex, A LOT wilder sex, and sex that lasts A LOT longer, and that everyone else has A LOT bigger dick. None of it is true, but since you don’t see real people having real sex and most men haven’t seen other men’s real erections, they have no perspective.

Ms jennimiller29 may have thought the Corporate Welfare Queen needed to be brought down a notch or two because she didn’t deserve all the sweet corporate welfare largesse she married into and the Queen figured that someone with such a cute family and cute life didn’t deserve it either and feared that jennimiller29 might be happier than she is even though jennimiller29 didn’t have as much money and power.

Self-serving Bias

Self-serving bias is the tendency to see our own motivations and behaviors in the best possible light and the behavior of others as being due to unsavory personality traits. Most people believe that their motivations and behaviors are unsullied by negative traits like political ideology or racism or classism. That’s for everybody else. Us, we’re the good guys! We see the world as it really truly is.

Of course, the Corporate Welfare Queen was just defending herself from an unprovoked and unreasonable attack from one of the rabble rousing peons of the world. Ms jennimiller29 deigned to rise up out of the filthy masses and defile her Instantly Grammed page with such an unwarranted and penetrating accusation. How could this veritable servant and obvious laborer understand the truly wealthy? If she let jennimiller29 get away with #deplorable, why her social media feed would be filled with similar horrific and sophistical attacks! What’s a corporate welfare queen to do? Obviously she’s damned if she defended herself and damned if she didn’t. Sad.

Ms jennimiller29 probably saw the Corporate Welfare Queen as arrogantly flaunting her wealth and privilege because of her #deplorable personality (she definitely was), and she was just speaking truth to power and was hoping for one of those righteous, from your lips to god’s ears, responses from other readers not the viscous sarcasm of the personal attack that she got.

The problem is that the rich and privileged class cannot conceive of what life is like without their wealth and privilege even if they came up poor. They’ve lost perspective. It led to Romney suggesting that if you were having trouble meeting your student loan payments, you should just borrow from your old man or some other ridiculously out of touch and impossible-for-the-rest-of-us suggestion.

The real lesson here is fuck the wealthy and privileged! They have a responsibility to work harder to maintain their perspective because their decisions have a disproportionate effect on the rest of us. And, they can afford the therapy or coaching or consciousness raising support groups or whatever else it might take to help them do so. Fuck them and their greedy grasping self-serving indulgence.