Foolish Is As Foolish Does

They played us all for fools. The bullshit has gotten so regular and so deep that we frogs are way past parboiled. No one wants to or is going to come out and say it plainly, but someone must. This Yemen Signal Chat scandal isn’t a scandal because they used an unsecured app. The real scandal is that a plurality of our country (or at least the majority of our dubiously elected officials) trusted that they were the best and the brightest. That they had our collective national backs. That they were restoring competence, protecting freedom, making us more “war-fighter” ready, defending the country. But these aren’t competent people. These are the dumbest, most self-serving cowards to ever hold power, the most powerful arsenal in the history of mankind, in what has heretofore been not just a modern democracy, but the most successful governance system the world has ever seen…one that has brought more peace and prosperity than the world has ever known.

These self-serving cowards are not just betting we’re all too dumb to know better. They’re betting we’re going to stay that way. They handed war plans to a journalist by accident!!! Real-time details of airstrikes!!!! There are not enough exclamation points available to properly highlight just how disastrous that is. No self-respecting intelligence agency or ally can ignore that level of utter incompetency. No one will or should trust an America run by these dolts with any valuable or sensitive intelligence. We are on our own now for sure and you can bet that our enemies are rubbing their hands together whenever they are not busy high-fiving one another.

Then they did what all corrupt politicians do when confronted with their egregious mistakes, they denied it. They lied. They doubled down. They tried every which way to cover it up. They tried to blame someone else. They blamed the journalist at the Atlantic, which raises the stupidity factor to incredulous levels. When that didn’t work, they tried to blame the press in general. Next they will undoubtedly turn to the chapter in the dictators handbook about accountability and find one poor schnook on the text chain, probably initially the lowest guy on the totem pole, and all point to him, wagging their fingers as he’s strung up to dry. It will not end there because the depth of the scandal demands more than one head to be served up, so a second member of the text chain will be thrown to the wolves in hopes of putting this to bed. But wait, before they go down that route, they need to try one more thing. They want us to believe it wasn’t even a big deal. Let’s see how that works, but I suspect when that wears thin all too quickly, the body count will begin. Funny thing about big scandals is that you can’t really tell in advance how many bodies it takes to stop the hemorrhage. This is likely when they will replay the old tactic of distraction to try and make the big deal that underlies this scandal not such a big deal in light of whatever current circumstances they fabricate.

But it was a big deal. It is a big deal. And it should not stop being a big deal. No role of government is more important, more sacrosanct, more relevant than national security. Remember what Colonel Jessup said on the stand in A Few Good Men. We want them on that wall. We NEED them on that wall. And it’s our job to keep them safe while they are on that wall.

This wasn’t a mistake by a staffer. This was the top national security officials (literally almost all of them… except perhaps the most important ones like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) of a U.S. administration, exposing American soldiers, leaking classified data, and celebrating death of collateral damage innocents in emoji-laden chats like it was fantasy football.

And instead of being fired, these incompetent, self-serving cowards, whose primary qualification for their job has been their sycophantic loyalty to Trump Almighty, are being protected… for the moment. We’ve all seen this play before with Trump, so it’s hard to pretend that we don’t know where it’s likely to go from here. With Trump, loyalty is a one-way street, so he will start by being loyal because it serves his interest and his ego to not be seen as having promoted anything less than the best than brightest. But when the going gets tough, we know where he goes (into the dining room to watch on TV?). It takes very little for him to throw overboard any and all of those sycophants that he needs to in order to preserve his standing. I will not pretend that this doesn’t happen in other less devious or incompetent administrations, but it does happen more and more predictably with Trump.

Why is this so? Because this regime isn’t run by patriots. It isn’t run by ethical men and women who care about our country. It’s run by grifters in suits and long red ties, backed by billionaires, feeding us propaganda of unprecedented proportions while they siphon off power, destroy institutions, and call it “efficiency.” They make Rasputin look like a well-dressed and sensible fellow. They are playing to our baser instincts of wanting lower taxes, a better life and the ability to ignore the reality of our 8 billion person world. They’re firing veterans and career public servants while keeping and protecting clowns who violate our trust. They think we’ll just swallow the next lie, and the next one, and the one after that. They expect that we’ll stay busy arguing over alphabet soup like DEI and ESG, scary criminal immigrants and pronouns while they steal everything not nailed to the floor. They’re claiming to save taxpayer money while giving billionaires tax cuts and private companies control over public assets… our assets. They are systematically dismantling anything they don’t like in our government, including our primary revenue engine, the Internal Revenue Service, their mortal enemy. They are not making government more efficient. They are looting it. They are not protecting our future. They are playing roulette with it. They’re not smarter than us. Not better. Just more shameless.

What will it take to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt? We need to stop thinking this is about left or right. This is about the powerful, who are only powerful because we handed it to them, believing they’re untouchable. Because the real scandal isn’t their mistake and this Yemen Signal text chain. The really scandalous act is that they looked us in the eye, did it anyway, expected us to shut up, say thank you, and go about binging our next Netflix show. It’s time for our electorate to WAKE UP, SPEAK UP, and stop tolerating this fraud being perpetrated on our sacred nation. The longer we take to do this, the more we become the problem. Foolish is as foolish does.