What's it take to get fired around here, anyway?
Beats me.
Anyone remember anybody getting fired after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?
Me either.
What I remember is President George W. Bush deciding that the various and sundry (and endless) agencies of government weren't communicating with each other – the silo effect – and the answer was to create an even bigger beast of government in the Department of Homeland Security.
“Yeah,” as comedian Jon Lovitz used to say, “that's the ticket!” Headed up today by none other than Mr. Open Borders himself, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, survivor of impeachment, welcome mat for millions of undocumented aliens, and – not a title to be bestowed lightly – probably the most incompetent cabinet member in the sorry array advising incompetent President Joe Biden.
(Even worse than the guy who thinks he's a woman.)
(Even worse than the Secretary of Defense who went missing for a while, and who Biden, try as he might, just can't remember his name. Only his color.)
Remember after 9/11, how some blue-ribbon panel said that the thing we did wrong was not “connecting the dots,” and imagining that maniacs would come to our country, get trained to fly airliners, then fly those airliners into buildings? They said our government showed a “failure of imagination,” in not anticipating such mayhem.
Well, take a look around us today, friends. Look at all those dots - big as hot air balloons - floating around our heads, eluding the dot connecting procedure. It only took 19 lunatics to unleash the terror of 9/11, while today the number of people streaming across our southern border numbers somewhere north of 10 million. It's so bad we can't even come up with an accurate number.
What could possibly go wrong?
(When I was at UW, the university participated in the World Campus Afloat program. We sailed around the world in 1971, visiting 11 countries. Every one of those countries took their borders seriously. And when we landed in New York, getting back into our own country was the toughest of all. Open borders? Not back then.)
Today, we're setting world records of not connecting dots. We're not just lacking imagination, we're not even awake, or aware. Even repeated warnings from our FBI Director can't jerk a reaction out of us.
Don't worry, as the song goes, be happy.
We got a real reminder of incompetence last week when a kid got onto a roof in Butler Township, PA, and came perilously close to killing Donald J. Trump with a rifle shot. This, despite the cries of people attending the rally to authorities, prior to the shooting, that there was a guy with a gun on the roof, a mere 130 yards away from Trump.
Even the kid's parents had called police earlier in the day, worried about what their troubled son might be up to.
What can you say when people attending a Trump rally figure out that the former president's life is in danger, but multiple layers of officials charged with protecting Trump missed the obvious security lapse, didn't act in time, and very nearly presided over the death of a presidential front-runner?
Most ludicrous: Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle's suggestion that because the roof the gunman shot from was sloped and deemed unsafe, law enforcement personnel were not placed there. Not too dangerous, however, for the aspiring assassin.
There was talk about problems with communication between the agencies - those silos again. Maybe the Trump fans should have written a polite letter to the Secret Service in Washington, asking them to handle the assassin on the roof administratively.
For everyday people in Butler Township that day, to see the guy they hope becomes our next president, the message – unsuccessful – was abundantly clear:
“There's a guy with A GUN on the ROOF! DO SOMETHING!”
Predictably, the incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security has expressed complete confidence in incompetent Secret Service Director Cheatle. As of Friday, she was vowing not to resign, but pressure was mounting.
What does it take to get someone fired in this shockingly incompetent government?
A dead former president?
A dead leading candidate for president?
God help us. (Because the bureaucracy isn't.)
Dave Simpson can be reached at: DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
