I’ve occasionally railed about people who can’t help but see the world through their prism – for instance, a person paranoid about the Deep State would try to see everything, including blood test results, as evidence of the Deep State and evidence that the Deep State is trying to get them. So now it only makes sense to ask if I’m doing the same thing when I read this Politico piece on the Trump loyalty test:
In the middle of a devastating pandemic and a searing economic crisis, the White House has an urgent question for its colleagues across the administration: Are you loyal enough to President Donald Trump?
The White House’s presidential personnel office is conducting one-on-one interviews with health officials and hundreds of other political appointees across federal agencies, an exercise some of the subjects have called “loyalty tests” to root out threats of leaks and other potentially subversive acts just months before the presidential election, according to interviews with 15 current and former senior administration officials.
The interviews are being arranged with officials across a wide range of departments including Health and Human Services, Defense, Treasury, Labor and Commerce and include the top tier of Trump aides: Senate-confirmed appointees. Officials are expected to detail their career goals and thoughts on current policies, said more than a dozen people across the administration with knowledge of the meetings.
White House officials have said the interviews are a necessary exercise to determine who would be willing to serve in a second term if President Donald Trump is reelected. But officials summoned for the interviews say the exercise is distracting from numerous policy priorities, like working to fight the pandemic, revitalizing the economy or overhauling regulation, and instead reflect the White House’s conviction that a “deep state” is working to undermine the president.
Having watched the babbling, nonsensical brook which is President Trump from the beginning, and having it reinforced by the Tuesday Rose Garden rant, it seems to me that anyone who is competent and opens their mouth is very likely to say something at variance with President Trump’s utterances – and since he can’t stand to be contradicted in public, it exacerbates Trump’s temper.
So, in essence, this is another way to make the government even more incompetent. The Administration may be sincere in their search for the disloyal, but increasing incompetency is the net effect.
And that’s rather become my prism, hasn’t it? Republican amateurism and the damage it’s doing to the formerly great United States, now the object of pity world-wide. I don’t really like it, but it’s how I read the situation, and what I’m forced to bark to the moon. Because that’s what I think the reality of the situation happens to be, and we can’t go on much longer.
So get out and vote, folks. Every vote for Biden and Democratic legislative candidates is, unlike most years, a message to the Republican Party that their second rate people and third rate methods and fourth rate ideology is no longer acceptable in a United States which wishes to become first rate again.
And we need both left and right clicking on all cylinders in order to be successful in the future.
