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.