Every now and then a story pops up that perfectly captures something important about a person or an agency or a policy. Today that story is this one , which begins thus:
It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the official federal antiterrorism database.
What’s so perfect about it, as diagnostic of an administration in a state of complete collapse, is not the ridiculous list, but that two senior DHS officials would defend it (a few paragraphs down) with a straight face, and with attribution. Being uninformed or misinformed is one thing, but it’s a higher level of cluelessness to be blatantly ridiculous and have no idea. It’s what makes Bill Irwin’s stage persona hilarious, but makes our current government heartbreaking. If Irwin were the clown he plays, we wouldn’t laugh.
I say with confidence that everyone operationally involved in the production of this list is a career civil servant, and that the silliness of the list has nothing to do with an “administration in collapse,” but merely illustrates the usual silliness of government bureaucracies. (But if we’d just give those same bureaucracies more power over our health care system . . . !)
No, actually it’s george w. bush’s own personal list. That’s what it means to be the unitary head of the “unitary executive branch”: you’re responsible for every damn thing that happens in every damn little office of the whole damn thing. If you don’t like taking the responsibility, don’t try to pull that king crap.
I’ve never seen such a bunch. Everybody has to bow to their miraculous powers, but no one in the crew actually has to get anything even remotely right.
Would you consider it silly to say that the Hamas would attack a pizza parlor or a school bus in Israel? Can’t you people get it- terrorists are terrorist. To them children are a legitimate targets.