Thursday, June 21, 2018

You Say "Clown Circus" Like It's A Bad Thing

     The two complaints I see directed at the Trump Administration are that A) everyone involved is Pure Evil and B) they're incompetent.

     As for "evil," well, there's plenty of that; it's pretty hard to be POTUS without being at least mildly evil.  It can be (and usually is) argued that many of the wicked things Presidents do (and considered all by itself, an act like, say, destroying the power distribution and civil government of a region or country is, in fact, evil: innocent people will die from it, no matter how "surgical" the airstrikes) are done to stop or prevent even greater evils.  And Presidents routinely do just that, or at least just about all of them during my lifetime have done that --- even really nice Presidents, darlings of the media, have to wear the Commander-in-Chef hat.  So I'm going to posit the evil part, suggest it is inherent in government and add that a big government is more able to commit great evils than a small government.  YMMV, but it's difficult to find exceptions.

     Incompetence is another matter.  We have a government that was originally set up to be operated by amateurs.  Part-timers.  People who had other work, who took two or four or six -- or twenty -- years away to serve their country, to represent their state or district or shake hands with kings and try to keep the place from going off the rails, or to sit as judges.  The first generation of Federal officials included plenty of hardcore hobbyists, more than a few genuine idealists and lots of men with prior govenmental experience, but they were, nonetheless, amateurs, and we've had a good many in Congress and the White House since -- engineers, college professors, farmers, former military officers.  The country has survived them, survived the people they appointed, survived their sometimes less-than-wonderful Cabinet choices.  Incompetence may, in fact, be a virtue, in that people who aren't sure how it all works and are learning on the job have a lot less time and opportunity to get up to really big, complicated badness without being tripped up or found out in the process.  All first-term Presidents are new at the job; even second-term ones have only been at it for four years and after four more, they're out for good; they'll never do that work again.

     I'm not hugely impressed by Mr. Trump's Administration.  It think it tends to flounder.  It looks very ad-hoc to me.  But I don't think it is The End Of The Republic; among other reasons, it's thoroughly (if somewhat paranoiacally) watchdogged by the Press and the opposing party; the biggest risk there is missing substantive issues among wild confabulations of sky-falling speculation.

     Might as well enjoy the popcorn.

7 comments:

rickn8or said...

"The two complaints I see directed at the Trump Administration are that A) everyone involved is Pure Evil and B) they're incompetent."

The food here is terrible! It's pure poison! And in such small portions too.

Yes, I also have been more impressed with the performance of "amateur" Presidents than the professional ones.

Chuck Pergiel said...

Your good words improved my outlook this morning. Seems like everyone I know is suffering from one physical malady or another. I hope you beat yours into submission.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

WRT the appearance of incompetence -- If the federal government would return to Constitutional principles, it would have a lot less to do, and therefore a significant reduction in the "Well, that's a great idea but SQUIRREL!" method of governance that has become the norm since, well, probably since five minutes after the Constitution was ratified, and which infects every administration with the odor of incompetence.

The President should not be jumping from frying pan to frying pan all day, trying to avoid the fire. Indeed, the President should not be on TV constantly, and certainly not on Twitter. He's got people to do that. But the upshot is, if he can give any given issue more than five minutes of substantive thought, it's because he's ignoring other things -- at his peril. But this is what our national government has turned into in the age of the Feds taking over things they have no business taking over.

Monty James said...

I've seen worse. Not too crazy about the press vigilantly watchdogging one party and not the other. My life staggers along, somehow.

Roberta X said...

Monty, I'm not real pleased with uneven suspiciousness on the part of the Press -- but knowing that they watch the GOP more closely than the Dems has helped guide my vote in races where the LP isn't running anyone and there's no clear best choice: I can count on there being plenty of oversight on the Republican.

Paul said...

I think Trump is doing a fine job. It does look at times like he is lurching from one disaster to another but I blame that lens on the media as they cannot find anything he does well. It must be hard to be so obviously rooting for the end of the world as they are.

The best thing is it so obvious even the less informed people who live in this country are picking up on it.

Hopefully he can roll back the worst of the government brakes on the economy and capitalism will get a full head of steam that will take the dems 30 years to stop.

Capitalism might not be the best form of government but it is the best we have come up with so far.

Roberta X said...

I'm trying to figure out where inciting a tariff war is "doing a fine job" and how, exactly, that kind of government thumb on the scales is supposed to be helping capitalism?

BTW, capitalism isn't a form of government in any way, shape or form, it's an economic system. This confusing of economics with government is precisely what's wrong with Marxism. It's not less wrong when non-communists do it, it just makes even less sense.