Going, Going. Gone

The credibility of the mainstream press establishment is shimmering into nothingness, like the last bit of winter snow after a week of warm spring days; just as our respect and trust for such federal bureaucracies and establishments like the FBI are similarly evaporating. While acknowledging and accepting that such establishments are operated by mere mortals, with all the weaknesses and moral failings that ordinary human beings are heir to, and grudgingly accepting the understanding that the establishment news media trends strongly to the left in political sympathies … look, we can accept all that and a certain degree of human bias, but what’s getting hard to swallow of late is the sheer, mind-numbing, flaming incompetence of them all. Which might be a blessing, for terrifying competence on the part of our current Ruling Class and their minions would make protesting or opposing them that much more difficult. Instead, as Kirk so memorably put it last week,

“What we have is, instead, an aristocracy of dunces, men and women who tell the rest of us how smart they are, and then screw up the entirety of civilization based on fantasies they’ve come up with. The rest of us need to start recognizing that the emperor not only isn’t wearing any clothes, he’s drunk off his ass and waving his wing-wang in our faces. The people who’ve flim-flammed their way into power are all dangerously inept and terminally deluded. If you doubt me, open your eyes and look around yourself: Is there anything, anything at all that these soi-disant “elites” have gotten right in the last century? Anything at all?”

I have to admit that I supported the Republican part of this "establishment" in part because the Democrats were undoubtedly worse.  In part I allowed myself to be deluded (McCain, Romney). But the Never-Trump part of the Right has self-identified as deranged poltroons.  The curtain has been ripped in two and the fakery, the genuine incompetence and venality has been exposed.   And it was due to one man who the establishment could not destroy or dominate.  God really does work in mysterious ways with imperfect tools.  Thanks be to God.

Popehat: "The criminal justice system really is this malign and incompetent"

In a series of tweets

I get it. Epstein is one of the most famous and controversial prisoners in the world, a focus of immense media/political attention, and recently may have attempted suicide.

Therefore, you think, it is extremely implausible that jail officials would allow him to kill himself.

 But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff.

 You find it implausible because you think jailers would have to be freakishly incompetent to allow it to happen, and surely they aren’t. But they often are. You find it implausible because they would have to be wantonly indifferent to human life, and surely they aren’t. Dude.

 You find it implausible because jailers/law enforcement would surely get into huge trouble for letting something like this happen. Consequences? To law enforcement? For something happening to someone in custody? You gullible dipshit.

 In short, you find it implausible because you’ve accepted the fairy tale version of the criminal justice system, one utterly divorced from the reality. And you’ve managed to convince yourself that your view is “sophisticated” and that thinking this could happen is “naive.”

 Could there be more than malign indifference and incompetence? Sure. Maybe they hoped he would kill himself. Maybe he even bribed someone to look the other way so he could. Maybe there even is deliberate foul play.

 But if your belief is “it has to be murder, because nobody is this incompetent or indifferent,” you’re a willfully blind fool, a useful idiot for a despicable system.

That's the excuse I would use if I were the warden.  The "I'm not evil, I'm stupid" excuse.

Grassley: FBI didn’t contact Google during probe on Florida shooter

It's almost as if the FBI doesn't care about school shootings AND is grossly incompetent.

The FBI was told of a threat accused Florida shooter Nikolas Cruz made on YouTube last September but never contacted the company to track down its source, missing an early indicator, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said Friday.

Someone reported the online threat to the FBI and the bureau opened a counterterrorism investigation but closed it on Oct. 11 saying it never managed to identify the person behind the post.

It wasn’t until after last week’s school massacre that the FBI did track down the author and found it was the 19-year-old man now accused of slaying 17 people at his former high school, Mr. Grassley’s office said, after getting briefings from both the FBI and Google.