Will Pete Hegseth outlast the lettuce?
Time once again to trot out this gem from Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor” (1994). Jack Ryan is the president’s national security advisor. That the post is currently held in the Trump 2.0 administration by Michael Waltz, the man who famously added The Atlantic‘s the editor-in-chief to a Signal discussion of details of an imminent U.S. attack on Yemen:
“You mean,” Robberton said, opening the basement door to the West Wing.
“You mean to tell me that it’s that screwed up?”
“Paul, you think you’re smart?” Jack asked. The question took the Secret Service man aback a little.
“Yeah, I do. So?”
“So why do you suppose that anybody else is smarter than you are? They are not, Paul,” Ryan went on. “They have a different job, but it isn’t about brains. It’s about education and experience. Those people don’t know crap about running a criminal investigation. Neither do I. Every job requires brains, Paul. But you can’t know them all. Anyway, bottom line, okay? No, they are not any smarter than you, and maybe not as smart as you. It’s just that it’s their job to run the financial markets, and your job to do something else.”
“Jesus,” Robberton breathed, dropping off Ryan at his office door.
Jesus, indeed.
The people at the top of this page don’t know crap about Operational Security (OPSEC). Neither do I. But I know more than they do, and so do you. Yet they’ve been apppointed to some of the highest offices in the world with responsibilities most of us could not fathom and whose decisions can get people killed or sent off for life to infamous prisons.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, was once a soldier a should have known better. He should be smarter, but he isn’t.
Brian Klass today ponders “Why do so many fools end up in positions of authority?” Bertrand Russell offered an answer in 1946: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Klaas writes:
Nowhere were the world’s powerful but cocksure fools more exposed than in the metastasizing Signal scandal, in which America’s ever-swaggering and perfectly-coiffed texters spent more time checking their hair than checking whether their little fingers were sending classified intelligence to the wrong person before they blew up a bunch of civilians.
Once exposed, they then racked their big brains for how to limit the damage from their boneheaded mistake and came up with another ingenious idea: what if we lied about it by falsely claiming that none of the information being shared was classified? Surely nothing bad could happen next!
It never occurred to them, it seems, that the inevitable outcome of that lie was for the journalist, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, to call their bluff by sharing the entire thread.
But there is a bigger story than a clustefuck of Trump officials acting like lying-through-their-teeth idiots.
There is no Secret Genius lurking in the Trump administration. They’re not playing 3-D chess. There’s not some grand strategy. No, Occam’s Razor cuts deep here, and lots of blood may soon be spilled as a result of the evident implication:
The most powerful people in the world are both stupid and incompetent.
And the people who can’t themselves use secure communications are also surveilling our communications and disappearing people off the street.
One can only hope that as a first step the Lincoln Project has a sound bead on where this is headed soon.
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