markjoseph

WATCH IN FULL: All 46 minutes of the Oval Office meeting between President Donald J. Trump and President Zelenskyy

I'm concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service. The reality is very different, and I'm not even sure that Elon entirely understands this. For more than a century, even dating back to 1883, the civil service has grown and grown without check from the elected branch, either the presidency or the legislature . The bureaucracies have ballooned from a few to 450 or so. The bloat and absurdities have grown too. Get this: no one has ever known what to do about it. Not Coolidge, not Hoover, not Nixon, not Reagan, not Clinton, no one. No president has been able to crack this nut. The only reforms ever to have made it through are those that make the administrative state bigger, never smaller. Countless cabinet secretaries have come and gone, always with the intention of making a change but leaving saddened, demoralized, outwitted, outgunned, and ultimately devoured. No president has seriously taken on this problem because they simply did not know how. The unions are powerful, the intimidation from the deep institutional knowledge is overwhelming, the fear of the media as been powerful, and every single president comes to power vaguely feeling threatened by the intelligence agencies. The industries that have captured every single agency were also far too powerful to unseat or control. This combination of institutional inertia has blocked serious reform for a full century. No one has dared. No one has even had a theory or strategy about what to do about this problem. It had become so terrible that most people in politics have simply surrendered, like homeowners who know there are rats in the basement and bats in the attic but long ago gave up trying to fix the issue. All this time, the American people have felt themselves ever more oppressed, weighed upon, taxed and regulated, spied upon, brow beaten, and otherwise overwhelmed. Voting never made any difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies ruled all. The Biden years underscored the point. We didn't even need a conscious and present executive. We only needed a figurehead to pretend to be president, just like the Soviet premiers in the old days. The institutions ran everything and the people controlled nothing. How to deal with this? Trump alone figured it out in his last term: he simply took charge of the agencies in a limited way. There were screams of horror and plots galore. They performed a long stream of clever schemes to destroy him and show him who is boss, which is not the democratically elected president but the forces behind the scenes. The job of the president, goes the message from all the insiders, is to PRETEND to be in charge but not actually do anything meaningful. Shut up, mug up, obey, and disturb nothing, let the administrative state do its thing without oversight or disruption, and then you will get your honorary library and bestselling autobiography and go down in history as great. Trump refused the deal and look what happened. Four years have gone by and Trump is back again, this time with a determination to slay this beast, one that he knows all-to-well. The efforts of DOGE and MAHA and MAGA are epic in scope, breaking a century of pathetic acquiescence toward the deep, middle, and shallow states, at last using moral courage to confront the problem head on, come what may. They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes. It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible. They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis, and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.

"This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait."--George H.W. Bush on August 5, 1990. Full quote from Jon Meacham's biography. Future history students will be asked why this stopped being the reaction of a Republican president to the invasion of a sovereign state by a dictator.

Yup

I am giddy every day, to a degree unheard of for middle-aged men. It's the feeling of being a little kid the night before Christmas. Every night I go to bed, knowing great surprises await in the morning. My blood is renewing, as if via spiritual transfusion. It feels fantastic.

Vance at the Munich Security Conference: "The threat that I worry that most about vis a vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within."

He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.

Absurdities of the week Why would those undocumented protestors now shutting down the 101 in Los Angeles burn the flag of the country in which they are demanding to remain—while waving the flag of the nation to which they apparently have no desire to return? Why here at home do we arrest drug dealers and kingpins for fueling mass opioid addictions, but, in the case of foreign-supplied drugs, claim American addicts are the real problem, but not Mexico and China, which deliberately help to supply, process, or disguise fentanyl to send across an open border- a drug which over the last decade they know has killed more Americans than all Americans killed in our 20th- and 21st-century wars? Why would not Mexico and Canada after years of either laxity or complicity simply not police their side of the borders and stop illegal exits and thus also reduce the supply of lethal drugs entering the U.S. while helping to reduce a bit their massive trade surpluses with the U.S.— over $160 billion in the case of Mexico and $50 billion with Canada—rather than vent over the unfairness of the U.S. seeking some belated and partial symmetry? Was NAFTA designed to smooth out trade imbalances or radically increase them? Why are we to sympathize with those grandees now forced to leave the FBI, or with retired intelligence authorities who knowingly signed a false letter to warp an election and thus are losing their security clearances—when just a few years ago they did their  best to weaponize and politicize hallowed intelligence and investigatory agencies? Should we not care more about restoring the lost reputations of agencies than the feelings of those who helped destroy them? Why is it legitimate for Los Angeles city and county agencies or the FAA for years to boast about the decisive role of DEI in their hiring, promotion, and retention, but suddenly it becomes illegitimate to even  question whether such emphases had the effect of diminishing meritocracy and with it life-saving effectiveness? Who are the real illiberal and the culpable— those throughout history who privilege  race, sex, and sexual orientation as essential prerequisites or those who see them as incidental not essential to our individual characters and identities?