The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director. With a team of incompetent and unqualified nitwits in charge of national defense and intelligence, we’re being left absurdly vulnerable to terrorist and military aggression. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping must be absolutely giddy.
One wonders how it is genuinely mediocre people rise to prominence, but it happens all the time. I read something at the Bulwark a couple of days ago that gave as good an answer as I ever heard. Jonathan Last writes that when he was much younger and writing for The Weekly Standard he read something by an economist named Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute that was obvious nonsense. Without going into details, it was. Just read Last’s Bulwark column. So Last met with Hassett to try to gently explain to him what he was missing, To no avail. “Hassett was unmoved,” Last writes. “Utterly and completely. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand me; it was that he didn’t want to understand. Invincible ignorance.”
So Last began checking Hassett’s other work and found he had a clear record of making wildly wrong predictions about the economy. But instead of hurting his career, Hassett kept getting promoted up the ladder at AEI. Conclusion:
My lunch with Kevin Hassett was the moment in which I stopped believing in meritocracy.
People succeed in life for lots of reasons. Intelligence, nepotism, charm, luck. So far as I could tell, Hassett had none of those. He was dim, ordinary, tiresome, and not particularly lucky, either.
He was merely the product of a system that needed people like Kevin Hassett to exist. And this system was designed to protect and promote the Kevin Hassetts of the world, irrespective of how silly they were.
Specimens like Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and even Donald Trump succeed because they are the products of a system that needs them to exist. This organization is not necessarily formally organized, but it exists. Trump’s specimens serve a larger purpose they themselves probably don’t understand.
Oh, and naturally Donald Trump made Kevin Hassett the Director of the National Economic Council. Being wrong a lot is no impediment in the Trump White House, as long as you tell Dear Leader what he wants to hear.
I read something else this week I wanted to mention in the post yesterday, but it was running a bit log so I left it out. But the Independent (UK) reiewed a book I remember reading about awhile back. A Very Stable Genius by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig was published in the U.S. in 2020, but I take it that it was just released, or re-released, in the UK. Here’s a bit from the review:
“Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Mr Trump reportedly asked John Kelly, his then-chief of staff, when they took a private tour in 2017 of the USS Arizona Memorial, a ship commemorating the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.
“Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else,” write the authors, who quote a former White House adviser concluding the US president was “dangerously uninformed”.
This gives us a sense not only of Trump’s bottomless ignorance but of the insulated world he lived in all his life. Most of us born in the 1940s and early 1950s grew up watching World War II movies and listening to our parents and their friends talk about the war. Trump, obviously, did not. He must have even missed From Here to Eternity. His father — said to have been a Nazi sympathizer — knew New York real estate. And Trump seems not to have ever been the least bit curious about anything else. That’s his whole world. No wonder he thinks strategic alliances are just arrangements in which foreign countries pay us to protect them. And since he knows nothing about history, he can’t possibly fathom why western Europe has no interest in appeasing Putin.
Here’s another bit from the review:
During a meeting with Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister’s “eyes bulged out in surprise”, the Washington Post reporters claim, when Mr Trump told him: “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”
China and India in fact share more than 2,000 miles of common border.
Mr Modi’s expression “shifted from shock and concern to resignation”, with aides telling the authors the Indians “took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the US following the meeting.
And this:
When Mr Trump early in his tenure agreed to feature in an HBO documentary in which all living presidents read from the constitution, Mr Trump blamed others in the room when he struggled to read the text.
“It’s like a foreign language,” he allegedly complained.
There really was such an HBO feature, called The Words That Built America. It was directed by Alexandra Pelosi. They must have done enough takes of Trump’s reading that he didn’t come across as illiterate. But this may be why he still doesn’t know how the federal government is structured and what the role of POTUS actually is. He can’t read.
During his first term he claimed Article II gave him the power to do whatever he wants. Which of course it does not. Article II has 12 or 13 paragraphs, most of which are about how a president is elected, compensated, and sworn in. The actual job description is in the next four paragraphs, in which the words “Advice and Consent of the Senate” are featured prominently. And then the last paragraph is about impeachment. But those four paragraphs provide a remarkably limited job description.
Trump is way too stupid to see how the, um, characters who are running his government are setting him up to fail. They’re all in way over their heads. They are all compromised up the wazoo. The real world is going to catch up with them all eventually. I hope not too many innocent people will be hurt, but I fear they will be.
"One wonders how it is genuinely mediocre people rise to prominence, but it happens all the time"
My experience as an Engineer for thirty five plus years is that most of the truly gifted people I worked with had no interest in moving up, they enjoyed being an engineer, they wanted to apply their craft and make things work. Only the half-steppers really wanted to move into management or sales. It was the same at every company I worked at, my entire career I really only had two truly talented bosses (out of at least twenty), managers that understood the technical stuff and manage people in an effective manner. The rest of them were not that bright at being an engineer and certainly couldn't manage a group of technical people either. The old timers always had a saying: "you never take a good man out of the field". Most of the mediocre bosses never made it much past middle management so the damage they caused was limited. Stump has managed to put the most incompetent fools he (and Vlad) could possibly find for positions that have the potential to bring this country to its knees. I have said this, and I'll keep saying it, I don't know how anyone looks at this and thinks this wasn't designed this way. Stump doesn't have the brains to engineer this inevitable downfall on his own, but Vlad certainly does. We're fucked!
That's part of it, I'm sure. But it doesn't account for the whole phenomenon that I'm seeing.
I only mentioned it because it lines up with the quote " how it is genuinely mediocre people rise to prominence, but it happens all the time". That of course was my own experience as an engineer. What Stump is doing is much more nefarious. A gentle explanation is that he is as dumb as a post and only wants people under him that are just as dull. He doesn't want people telling him he's wrong which occasionally happened in his first term. The more likely explanation is that is only appointing people who have pledged complete subservience to him and will carry out every order without question or pushback. We saw on January 6th what he really wants and is capable of. He wants to cripple the Federal government and he just might succeed this time.
Going a little OT – I think I saw an interesting head fake from Trump. He suggested everyone should get a thousand-dollar rebate check presumably because Musk had done so well in his first month cutting waste and fraud. Now the suggestion that the federal government can afford that giveaway is ridiculous. Trump won't get his budget passed by reconciliation with a majority in the House and Senate. To pay for tax cuts and Trump's concentration camps, they have to cut Medicaid so deeply that moderate (vulnerable) Republicans have balked. Even Trump knows it's stuck and why. So what's the purpose of suggesting a massive giveaway that can't get off the ground?
IMO, Trump has seen the polls. The mass and random layoffs and attempts to freeze programs is not playing well. So Trump wants the uninformed voter to think that the government will throw money at him if Trump/Musk can continue. Trump is dumb as a box of rocks but even he sees that the plan is in jeopardy only a month into the purge if public support is weakening. This is BEFORE the public starts to feel the pain from the cuts.
Regarding the difference between good leaders and poor leaders, a prime characteristic is an obsession with who gets the credit and who gets the blame (poor leaders) OR getting a quality product done by a team effort. (good leaders) IMO, Republican leadership in Congress is obsessed with surviving the next election REGARDLESS OF WHAT GETS DONE! Trump is a unique problem to the GOP in Congress. If they defy Trump, he can primary most of them. Initially. I think a lot of Republicans thought they could control the monster. Whoops! The monster is off the leash and rejecting responsible advice from Republicans with experience and savvy about getting things done.
There's a tactic for bringing down a supervisor who is a darling of upper management and totally incompetent and out of control. Instead of softening the damage and trying to bend the arc of the most idiotic policies, you implement them, making sure to document that he's the source to make sure he gets the credit he deserves. And let the sh*t hit the fan. Yeah, he will deflect and try to transfer blame but if no sane and knowledgeable person intervenes, upper management will send someone down to figure out WTF is going wrong.
Suppose that's what the Senate is doing. They can't fight Trump on his nominees. The only one remotely qualified is Rubio. (I'm no fan of Rubio, but he has worked in Government, and he knows what the different departments do and how funding works.) The rest of them don't know their donkey from a hole in the ground. The Senate deferred completely. (Collins and Murkowski drew the line with Patel.) If they just redecorated their office and stayed out of the way, things would survive. But they are going to ruin everything they touch. The Senate knows it. And everything will come apart. The Republican Senators will respond with complete surprise – "We gave the King everyone he selected. How can it be that nothing works?" Dumping the blame in Trump's lap.
When Trump is getting the blame for plane crashes, for wildfires (and no Forest Service response) and hurricanes (and no FEMA) and crime skyrockets because the FBI is staffed with baboons, and business is dumping toxic waste directly into rivers and the ocean – and there's no EPA… I can go on… I think the Senate will (with mock surprise) say they knew King Trump was brilliant and would fix it. As I said yesterday, when Trump is despised for the misery he has inflicted, I think the Senate will convict in an impeachment trial. That's IF Trump and his merry band of bumbling idiots are as destructive as I think they will be.
The backlash will be as big as the catastrophe.
Great post title and I think it really describes the moment and, to me, alludes to how most of the non-cult members underestimate Orange Kinglet and the magats. The three-time divorcee is an idiot-savant. He may not know the details of the entry of the Japanese Empire into Dub Dub Dos, but he can move a crowd to a frenzy and use mass media to convince people to ignore the traditional democratic-constitutional values of Amerika. I come from what is called a "peace church" and this informs my values, but I do not see any creative action to stop, on a local level, the power of the magat propaganda in this context. The red-letter text of the Good News talks a lot about things (lots about divorce), but turn the cheek means something completely different these days. So these "not so bright people" have hacked religion as well. Who is dumb now? The, um, Demoncrats, have been trying to say that they are the party of the smart people but I see ostriches being smart amongst themselves and ignored by the people who just want the Tee Vee politicos to make them feeeeeeeeel smart and right about being right… that feeeeeeeeeling is the core of the Banality of Evil. Pretty smart, IMHO.
And about those Nazi salutes, … they make the magats feeeeeeeeel good and so powerful! Same thing as how the megachurches use the swaying arms over the heads to get the blood flowing to the head to enhance the religious frenzy.
Top this? Top this with "akshually, the constitootion sez…"?
The markets trend down for the second day again and even in red districts representative face hostile constituents. No trust. No Confidence. It is not just us that see this as a horror show. Sloppy government is what they see, and they do not like it one bit. I like chaotic but sloppy will do also and has a better ring to it. So sloppy it is.
Its only been 30 days…and we got four years of this to deal with!
That said, in a way, its kind of good that they're doing the painful stuff up front, so hopefully the sooner people will wake up to what's going on. Musk thinks destroying people's lives is a joke — see his disastrous turn at CPAC. He comes off as a drug addled, immature child. He doesn't have that much more maturity, if at all, than his four year old son. I hope democrats have the foresight to share clips of him at CPAC waving that chain saw and laughing about what he's doing to peoples lives, so the voters can see who Trump and the GOP has turned loose on them. From the activity at the town halls, and all the phone calls, it looks that way.
"He comes off as a drug addled, immature child"
He is a drug addled, immature child.
"I hope democrats have the foresight to share clips of him at CPAC waving that chain saw and laughing about what he's doing to peoples lives"
Don't hold your breath Kamala Harris ran an entire presidential campaign without one lousy commercial showing the confederate flag waving magats or the cops being beaten by Stumps thugs. I see democratic senators on tee-vee using careful language like concered and troubled to describe what Stump is up to. The current crop of democrats seem almost as spineless sometimes as the GQP'ers. I saw Sen Rosen on tee-vee when asked why the democrats don't seem to be doing anything she said :"well it hasn't even been 100 days"?
From the penthouse to the outhouse in record time. CNN reporter says it this way:
The money is talking, and it is moving to select international markets according to CNBC.
True the election rode a wave of nihilism and free-floating anxiety really made by right wing media. Hysteria is the constant message of guys like Hannity and Tucker Carlson. As they, and imitators stirred up dissatisfaction, the public got jumpy and rejected the status quo. Now they see wave after wave of sloppy government and no relief from anxiety about the future. Spending is down. Money is moving overseas. Interest rates remain high, and money is tight, yet employment security is going down. The average citizen sees nothing changing for the better and much changing for the worse. Fires, bad weather, floods, sloppy government, more inflation, and way-less attention to their problems are not the changes they were looking for. Now they see their representatives as impotent in their duty. The magical powers advertised, vis-a-vis the product received is yielding waves of voter remorse.
Oh, the banality. We traded Biden-economics for a chain saw massacre of the economy they fear. This fear may just be based in reality not media created hysteria by right-wing kooks. The same kooks that believed Sadam had WMDs. The same kooks that saw great crimes in Benghazi. You know, the ones that would only eat freedom fries. The ones with a history of really poor judgement.