DOGE Must Die!

Hitman comes out of retirement for one last job.

It was September 23, 2007, when the world still had landlines, Sears Roebuck and democracy. The top movie of that week was — fittingly enough — Resident Evil: Extinction. And I, frustrated consumer, launched Comcast Must Die.

There’s a reason for dredging up such ancient history, as you shall soon vividly understand. Back then, after personally suffering a monumental customer-disservice experience, I commissioned a video and a jingle for a blog that gave other seething cable customers the chance to publicly document their own Comcast traumas.

“I will not be satisfied,” I wrote, with the subtlety that has always been my hallmark, “until Qualmcast is on its knees, weeping. In fact, I won’t be satisfied until it is heaving with sobs, squealing and hyperventilating with snot dripping from its nose.”

Done and done. The obvious part was the forum for rage against the machine, with tales of anguish that would make the corneas peel off of your eyeballs. The killer feature, though, was requiring posters to leave their Comcast customer numbers and no other personal information. This shamed the company into using a site called “ComcastMustDie.com” as its own customer-service vehicle of last resort.

Heh, heh. Yes, they tracked down the complainants and one-by-one resolved their service issues.

Did I say “shamed” them into action? Perhaps I mean “extorted.” But it was the most generous extortion ever, as I declared from the outset that I harbored no real death wish for Comcast, just a determination to drag an arrogant juggernaut kicking and screaming toward basic respect and service for the mere subscribers. The company expressed appreciation by cancelling $1 million of advertising with my then employer. But eventually, at far greater expense, it built a multimillion communications and resolution infrastructure to take ComcastMustDie.com out of the equation. And its senior vice president in time credited me with changing the company’s systems and culture. Thus was I dubbed in the press “The Braveheart of the Internet.” (NOTE: Whinging online is not bravery, and my heart isn’t in such great shape, either.) Anyway, after three years, I retired the website and moved on to other challenges. Until now.

Like every antihero hitman in every thriller ever made, I’m coming out of retirement for one last job to take on a modern arrogant juggernaut that makes Comcast look like the Salvation Army. I speak, of course, of Elon Musk’s DOGE (Demons Obliterating Government Essentials), which has spent more than a month dismantling the United States Government.

Rational Americans unblinded by bigotry, disinformation, resentment or nationalist zealotry are well aware of the destruction taking place before our eyes. Much of Red America — under the spell of demagogues and willful ignorance — still rage, like the Black Knight of Monty Python fame, in suicidal denial.

But some are gradually having the scales fall from their eyes. They may not acknowledge the fascist ideology of dictatorship they voted into office, but they know the price of eggs and cars. They know how long they wait to get the IRS, Social Security Administration, Medicare, National Park Service, Passport office and every other federal agency on the phone. They know that the plunging stock market is decimating their retirement nest egg. They are beginning to grasp that Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are on the chopping block, and that billions in other funding for health, education and welfare is being cancelled.

Hence: DOGE MUST DIE!

My scheme this time around is to quantify the misery with a Doge Pain Index (DPI), a series of hard statistics and polling data documenting the rising costs in a MAGA tyranny, all synthesized into a single value that fluctuates with the degree of misery — sort of a Net Promoter Score for government.

It will be built by mathematicians, software engineers, social media academics and web architects who have themselves been DOGE’d out of their careers. If you’ve seen or read Fahrenheit 451, think of them as the forest people who keep enlightenment alive by memorizing a classic book.

And, of course, the DPI Score will reside on a website which also invites the excruciating stories of ordinary Americans devastated by the vandalism, in every respect, to the American way of life. More details to follow.

Meantime, please spread this message far and wide, especially to the very tech world that spawned Elon Musk and his cruel pirates.

Readers and friends, this is the most important thing I’ll ever ask of you. Share, share, share. And in return — in the coming weeks — I promise you a delicious surprise.