A Bureaucracy for Life - Mark Steyn

One of the striking features of America's alleged "peaceful transition" is that senior figures in the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and others are happy to undermine him in public, and indeed openly defy him. When the media report on this phenomenon, the roles mysteriously get reversed: Donald J Trump is openly defying the All-Knowing Fauci on public health, is openly defying his Cyber-Security guys by undermining confidence in the election, is openly defying his chiefs of staff by wanting to bring troops home from Hoogivsastan...

In the American system, the President is head of the executive branch. For four years, the branch has regarded Trump's efforts to head them as a kind of impertinence. He was impeached because the briefly famous Vindman and those Foggy Bottom striped-pants panjandrums believe that America has a permanent Ukrainian policy that it is an unconstitutional abomination for mere transient politicians to attempt to change.....

The COVID-19 Crisis Is the Result of Decades of FDA Misrule

The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing how the US Food and Drug Administration puts Americans at increased risk of sickness and death. Decades of killing medical innovation and forcing industries offshore made this inevitable....

The FDA’s most public failure is its most recent, the blocking of any private production of coronavirus test kits during the initial outbreak. How many Americans will pay the ultimate price for this policy remains to be seen.

It wasn’t until March 16, over two weeks after the first American diagnosed with coronavirus died, that the FDA allowed private labs to have their testing kits approved by state agencies. By that time, about 5,145 people in the U.S. had been infected, and at least 91 died.

The MSM's complaint about Trump's "slow" response to the Wuhan flu is actually the fault of the bureaucracy he inherited.  The FDA is not "Trump's FDA" but the FDA that has been running and ruling the drug roost for numerous administrations and - under Obama - focused on obesity and race as the fashionable issues that he cared about.  It's why despite the fact that it's one job was to prepare the country for the virus, it was totally unprepared and actually interfered with the development of testing and treatment.  It's why the bureaucracy is even now fighting against treatments like hydroxychloroquine, because it's "not invented here."  People dying is not the FDA's focus.  They see their job as the gatekeeper for the treatment of diseases and they have a lengthy procedure in place that keeps them all employed.  Drug labeling is their focus.   Your life or death is not the issue.

NIH failed to test coronavirus drugs, studied drunk monkeys, soap operas, and tailgating instead

This is how the bureaucracy prepared the country for an epidemic .... not!

Career Officials Thwart Aid to Christian, Yazidi Genocide Victims

This is a scandal.  the anti-Christian bias of the Deep State is palpable.  They would like nothing better than to see Christianity wiped off the map in the part of the world where it began.

A Guide to Spygate

What you should know about the FBI is that it's a huge bureaucracy.  It keeps voluminous records, just like the Nazis did.  That's what's going to hang them.

The FBI is many things to many people, but seen from the inside where I spent my career as an FBI agent, most of all it is a bureaucracy. The evident abuses of the vast investigatory powers of the Bureau to surveil the campaign of Donald Trump has left a paper and electronic trail as it jumped through the many procedural hoops required for Spygate to unfold.

Read the whole thing.

DOJ Employee Donations Overwhelmingly Favor Democrats

This is why the Democrats get away with weaponizing government agencies.  It's the top reason to reduce the number of government employees.  Saving money is a distant second if we want to preserve the Republic.

DOJ workers handed out nearly $950,000 in total political donations in 2016. Of this amount, $818,985 went to Democrats, or 87 percent of the total donations. Republicans garnered $108,882 in donations from those at the agency in 2016, or 12 percent of all the money given.

Washington Bureaucrats Are Chipping Away at Trump’s Agenda

It takes time to clean house.  Faster please.

In report after report following Donald Trump’s election, career staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration kept saying the same thing: climate change is real, serious and man-made.

That’s surprising because Trump has called global warming a hoax. His political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, have complained to its staff, but stopped short of demanding changes or altering the findings. So the reports, blog posts and public updates kept flowing. The bureaucrats won.

“Everything coming out of NOAA does not reflect this administration,” said David Schnare, a retired lawyer for an industry-backed think tank who served on Trump’s transition team and is skeptical about climate change. “It reflects the last one.”

That’s true across the government as some of the roughly two million career staff have found ways to obstruct, slow down or simply ignore their new leader, the president.

Staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, issued a report contradicting the White House’s position about the negative effects of banking regulations. The State Department’s embassy staff preserved Obama-era programs to boost the economies of developing countries — at odds with Trump’s “America First” campaign pledges — not by changing the substance of the programs but merely by relabeling them as a way to create markets for U.S. exports.

Perhaps no policy area better illustrates the dynamic than climate change. A report commissioned by the energy secretary to explore the dangers of wind and solar energy to the power grid initially found just the opposite. Pentagon staffers effectively stalled a Trump reversal of an Obama policy on climate change and national security by initiating a review that’s apparently still underway nine months later. Federal procurement officials have kept promoting zero-emission vehicles but by focusing on economic gains rather than environmental benefits.

The ultimate conservative

The ultimate conservative is the cloistered academic or bureaucrat, who sees danger in the freedom of others to act out of their control, and whose income is secure no matter how slowly the economy grows.

"I was born to regulate"

I like having a very direct and very powerful impact on worker safety and health.  If you put out a reg, it matters.  I think that’s really where the thrill comes from.  And it is a thrill; it’s a high… I love it; I absolutely love it.  I was born to regulate.  I don’t know why, but that’s very true.  So as long as I’m regulating, I’m happy.

Marthe Kent
OSHA director of safety standards program.
National Review’s Internet Update
June 26, 2000


Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

― C.S. Lewis


First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Social Democrats, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Social Democrat. And then they realized that all their problems had pretty much been solved, so they stopped coming for people.

-Slavic Nationalist on GAB

Shit Bureaucrats Say

Securing the Obama Legacy

Walter Isaacson is concerned about Obama’s legacy. Writing in TIME, Obama Can Still Secure His Legacy, Isaacson urges Obama on to even greater heights.

Lauding him for his accomplishments so far:

President Obama has scored two monumental achievements: helping to restore the financial system after the 2008 collapse and making it possible for every American to get health care coverage …

He urges Obama finish out his term and rescue these “triumphs” with a burst of political rhetoric designed to save ObamaCare from being emasculated by that rascally Supreme Court and the halt the rise of income inequality.

Isaacson is the pluperfect illustration of the Limbaugh Theorem: nothing that happened during the Obama administration is his fault because he’s not in charge, except when he is. Isaacson gives him credit for “restoring the financial system” but rising income inequality is not his fault. And exactly how has Obama restored the financial system? The stimulus that did not provide the “shovel ready jobs” that we were promised? Quick, what else did Obama do to restore the financial system? Take over General Motors to keep it from bankruptcy? Oh, wait, GM did go bankrupt and the shareholders were wiped out.  Remember that billion dollar stimulus bill that was supposed to kick-start the economy by creating jobs by building schools and repairing roads and bridges?  This (see chart below) is what really happened. You may well ask where the money went.  It went to groups and people that supported Obama.

Isaacson gives Obama credit for “… making it possible for every American to get health care coverage…” Calling ObamaCare a success requires you to lie or have a kind of moral and political blindness that can only be found in the Salons of the power brokers on the Left. Ignoring the fact that Obama lied – repeatedly - about being able to keep your doctor and your plan, the rollout was an unmitigated disaster, many lost the coverage – and doctor - they liked and wanted, and 30 million people don’t have coverage. And this brilliant triumph is so bad that Obama postponed much of  its implementation until after this fall’s election.

Do you want to know what causes income inequality? It’s not having a job. It’s exiting the job market and living on welfare. And under Obama the Benevolent tens of millions have joined the jobless and exited the Middle Class.

You want to know what else causes income inequality? It’s making the cost of college unaffordable for millions of our young people graduating from high school. It's forcing students to go into debt.  It’s mal-educating those who go to college with courses that don’t prepare them for life after college. It’s allowing people to obtain degrees with “studies” courses that teach them to hate. To hate people with different skin colors, to hate people who don’t think the way their professors do, to hate the country they grew up in and hate the people that made this country great.

You want to know what else causes income inequality? It’s telling people that the careers they ought to be pursuing are in government or in the “helping” professions instead of in the “making” business. It’s the false notion that being a teacher is nobler than building a new car, building a home, starting a plumbing business or designing a new way of communicating.

But back to Isaacson and his hope for Obama’s legacy. He’s urging him to begin a crusade of “moral clarity and patriotic resonance: that every kid in the country deserves a decent shot.”

I’m not kidding; this is the plan. Where are the forces arrayed against every kid getting a decent shot? Who’s standing in the way of kids getting a decent shot? What does this mean as a policy?

Universal preschool, so that no child starts off behind. Quality after school activities and summer internships. Apprentice programs like the bill proposed by Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott. What also could be included is a public-private effort to create a service year program so that every kid after high school or college has the opportunity to spend a year serving their country in a military or domestic corps.

Isaacson never really ponders if universal pre-school will make kids equal. Just what are those “quality” after school activities and internships? Combined with that “service year” program it looks as if your kids will be run by Big Brother from the day they begin to toddle. It’s the Life Of Julia for everyone. 

That’s Walter Isaacson’s hope for Obama’s legacy and the future of America.  Liberal Fascism.

Smokey the Thug.

Jon Jarvis, Gute Amerikaner

On the principle of "know your enemy," here's a snapshot of the director of the National Park Service, the man who has been handing on the orders to block aged veterans from their monuments, eject retired couples from their homes, and forbid tourists to take photos of natural parks (hat tip: Clarice Feldman).

 

Jonathan B. Jarvis was appointed director of the NPS in 2009. He was employed by the service since 1976, beginning as an interpreter in the Washington, DC park system. He then served as a park ranger, resource manager, biologist, and chief ranger at parks including Prince William Forest Park in Virginia, Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, and Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and North Cascades National Park in Washington. He acted as superintendent at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and Mount Rainier National Park. In 2002 he was named Regional Director of the Pacific West Region, overseeing parks scattered across tens of thousands of miles in the Pacific.

That's it for Jonathan Jarvis. Nothing out of the ordinary -- no scandals, no controversies, not a word out of place, as far as the record shows. He's a little compulsive about green topics, thinking that his major duties involve "...climate change, urban development, habitat destruction, non-native species, and air and water pollution." But that's nothing unusual in today's NPS.

He's not your typical Obamacrat. Far from it: a career National Parks employee who worked his way up from ranger status straight to the top. Yet at the same time he is diligently and obediently, without protest as far as we know, carrying out the most obnoxious, detestable, and perhaps even illegal orders ever given a man in his position, exactly as if he was a swag-bellied, unqualified precinct captain dragged out of some Southside Chicago ward.

But that's the way it is with career bureaucrats -- like Lois Lerner, John Brennan, Keith Alexander and ten thousand others. We know from the historical record that bureaucrats will avidly commit the most horrendous crimes if ordered by the people at the top of the heap. There's a clear and distinct selection process in operation in bureaucracy. People who progress are those who will do what they're told without blinking. and Jarvis is perfect example.

Just like the "good Germans" just following orders.