She is Like an Addiction.

The Media Just Can’t Put Her Aside

“At this point, what difference does it make?”  That quote kept flashing through my head.  I could only smile at the outrage she now feels as a politician who so eagerly sought his support for the last 20 years.  I could not watch this without chuckling at how she can draw herself up in defense of women after spending so many years defending the exact same behavior in her husband.

There was a headline I saw today Washington Examiner.  “Hollywood is brave as long as the targets are easy,” an article by Becket Adams.

I think that applies equally well to this interview of Ms. Clinton.

So It Begins

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Photo from Reuters/Y. Gripas

Michael Flynn, has resigned.  His fall from grace was pretty quick and marks what I assume will become the beginnings of an administration frequently forced to let senior members go due to some political misstep.  I expect the social media propagandists are already making up the “I told you” memes about how this administration will be plagued by scandal, while the past one was “scandal free.”

Just two small points.  First, if anyone really looked at the last administration I doubt seriously they would believe it was scandal free.  Of course, in almost any other administration the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the DOJ gun running, and cover-up of the Clinton corruption would have led the press to call for the heads of the departments, if not the President himself, but when you have the press and all the democrats in Congress circle the wagons you can do almost anything.   
Remember how President Obama pledged to make his administration the most transparent ever?  No?  Well you’re not alone because no one ever held him to that pledge, and we had perhaps the opaquest and least scrutinized administration in my memory.

The second point is we now have a press and a professional bureaucracy setting out to make life as miserable as possible for the President.  Because of his outsider status and personally off-putting style, bad information will flow from the executive branch departments like water over the Oroville Dam spillway.  The opposition groups will do everything in their power to make mountains out of issues that were swept under the rug in past administrations.   

I don’t know if that is a bad thing, but it would be nice if there was some uniformity in holding administrations accountable to the people and not just when people we don’t like are in charge.

There Aught to be a Law!

This morning CSPAN replayed the Congressional hearings on the GSA scandal from earlier in the week.  It was both disturbing and amusing at the same time.  As the Republican members expressed their displeasure over the conduct of these civil servants, and got on their soapboxes with the moral indignation of someone who has only the taxpayers best interests at heart, the Democrats too expressed astonishment over the callous way these high-ranking career civil servants had squandered “other peoples money.”  These are the same politicians who cannot agree on a balanced budget, and think nothing of adding a $2M mark for a pet project to a funding bill!  Now that is funny stuff.

I am sure a new round of legislation, regulation, mandatory reporting, and new layers of lawyer oversight will be implemented so these violations of public trust will “NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!” When we decide it is wrong to teach morality, when we allow everyone to believe they can do whatever they want and there will be no repercussion how can this not happen again?  You cannot build an ever-larger government without expecting ever-larger scandal from lower and lower levels of the bureaucracy.  At least not until robots replace all the civil servants, and then we have to worry about one of them violating Asimov's first law.