The Epitome of Amateur Hour

It’s a causal change reaching all the way back Newt Gingrich^[1]:

1. Gingrich decrees the primal importance of win, win, win for the Republicans in the 1990s.
2. Republicans, already caught up in the faux philosophy of the divine, true or false, and shocking arrogance, discover the simpler decision-making becomes, the more likely they can gather votes. See Senator Goldwater’s prescient warning concerning pastors in the Republican Party.
3. This leads to the ascendancy of ideology and the denigration of experience, mo****, humility, compromise, and all the other attributes of adults who’ve discovered governing is not a simple checklist procedure, but a complex balancing of interests – sometimes international – that are rarely found in ideological precepts.
4. Republicans previously valued by their Party for their experience, flexibility, and humility begin leaving the Party, or at least leaving leadership positions. In more cases than might be thought, they are actively expelled from leadership or Party; see the highly respected Senator Lugar (R-IN) for a classic case; Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) both practiced running out moderate Republicans and experienced being run out himself.
5. Consequently, leadership eligibility in the Party became a list of policy positions and performative assertion of same, combined with the deliberate smearing of all opponents, rather than the Party-enhancing sober, honest debates. This is Politics as Entertainment, and while I’ll skip selecting a peak moment, the 2016 Presidential Republican Primary debates were certainly deeply silly, as was the Alabama Senatorial Republican primary contest, in which far-right wing Rep Mo Brooks (R-AL) was accused by backers of other Republicans of being an ISIS supporter, among other things. Leadership became a shrill pack of ideology shouters, with no positional incentives to moderate positions or act like, well, adults; position became dependent on purity; this translates, in power terms, to extremism. “Extremism in Defense of Liberty is No Vice” became the slogan, and then everything vociferously hid itself in Liberty’s hem. The end result were carriers of ideology.
6. Such folks are deeply vulnerable grifters and those who pursue power for its social advantage without regard to responsibility. Trump, once he had captured the imagination of the Republican base, forced out all leaders who’d compete, who’d not support him. Replacing them were the Trump supplicators and ideological specialists, sweating to find coveted positions, previously thought unobtainable, now in their grasp. All became political.
7. Trump wins and in they flood, replacing not only political appointees of the previous Administration, but even the non-political upper-level members of the bureaucracy.
8. And then they discovered the FAA actually requires competency.

Lots of stuff omitted, and some irrelevancies inserted. Such is the fruit of a head cold. But if you want to know what’s going on in El Paso and its airspace, closed and then opened, here’s an MS NOW report:

Two congressional officials told MS NOW that the dispute between the FAA and the Pentagon that led to the closure began when FAA officials raised concerns that the laser had not been properly vetted for use around a civilian airport. Military officials said the FAA was fully informed of their plans.

Smith said the agencies’ contradictory accounts were unacceptable and an example of the Trump administration’s poor management.

“The big issue here is the unbelievable incompetence of the Trump administration,” Smith said. “A major airport is shut down for 10 days without explanation. A full day later DOD, FAA and CBP can’t even come close to telling us what actually happened, and the White House, responsible for all of them, is just sitting around with their thumb up their ass.”

While undoubtedly a political report, it is deeply congruent with my expectations of the Republican Party, not just Trump. They’ve descended into the madness of ideology because that’s their perceived source of success, and their ego daren’t let them leave the morass, even as it solidifies into concrete and is carried to the edge of the water fall.

¹ No, no links; this head cold has me down. None of this is really new or hidden and can be easily found by the casual observer.