Gum Gummint

 

It’s getting tougher every day to have faith in the people running this country, and I’m not just talking about the political leaders at the top. Too many middle level positions are functional sinecures. Yes, there are some brilliant and wonderful people in government, but they are few and far between. The best and the brightest usually dissipate their whirlwind appetite for progressive change when confronted by the intransigent idiots who dominate and stagnate the bureaucracy.

The problem with government efficiency, or lack of it, is that the ignorance, incompetence, boredom and sloth is epidemic. The problem is not just stupid clerks misfiling patent applications. The problem is that the same mentality controls the 22 agencies who were brought together under the Department of Homeland Spuriousness and who hold sway over our national security.

What births this rant is the FBI announcing that after four years their terrorist tracking software isn’t what it should be. What do these G-men ever get right? Ruby Ridge? The Unabomber? The Atlanta Olympics Bomber? McVeigh and Nichols? Nope. And when all they had to do was organize a data base to track psychotics, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program that strip searches old ladies and turns around a plane because Cat Stevens was on board.

A national data base isn’t that complicated and they should have had a working system in place long before Nine-Eleven. One that everyone in our many law enforcement offices here and our allies abroad could have been using decades ago. If they had, most of the miscreants who have caused us problems would likely have been identified before they acted. It might not have stopped every act of terrorism but it would have helped. If thoughtful people were operating with it. Yes, a big if, but idealism is one of the straws you grasp for in the face of today’s governmental reality.

What is so irksome about their failure is that when they can’t get the easy ones right, it’s nigh on impossible to be hopeful about the big ones. Another story out last month reported that a guy who hacked into T-Mobile’s system was actually reading the email of one of the T-men who were investigating him. Ya gotta think he was wondering if they could be so stupid or if it was a trick. You almost wonder if the white hats are on our side any more.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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