If and when Obama ever leaves office, I’m going to go through a period of “decompression.” Like having the “bends.” Like a landscape painter who wakes up one day (on the morning of an Algorean “nuclear winter” or something) and finds all the trees and mountains and lakes are missing. Nothing more to paint or draw. As a half-baked political cartoonist, I don’t relish the thought.
Just after learning the CIA or some murky shadowy personage “underestimated” the potential for a terrorist caliphate materializing, we next learn that maybe the estimation of “murky folks” who remained un-named…but…blamed….didn’t matter anyway because “Mr Mom Shorts” was playing GOLF instead of showing up at the daily briefings concocted for his sole benefit, where he might have learned a thing or two about the history of the Middle East and the birth of Islam six centuries after the Birth, Death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. He might even have noticed the ritual and en masse beheadings by ISIS. Maybe.
Then…before we can even shift our seats on the sofa or get a sandwich during a news commercial…we learn that the female head of Secret Service (somehow I would have envisioned a burly, flat-topped, square jawed, blazer clad, scowling, retired Special Forces Colonel…MALE …in that job) (silly me…), is “retiring” because of “personal reasons.”
Also, possibly, because she doesn’t understand the basics of her job any better than anyone else in Obama’s Administration. Possibly, too, because she had allowed some clown to hop the fence at 1600 Penn. and run across OUR WH lawn and actually enter OUR White House. That’s right…the same White House where our unvetted prez puts his dirty shoes on OUR desk in OUR Oval Office.
I once worked for a big corporation. (It wasn’t meant to be. It was comfy and easy. Bad money. I only lasted about four years before I had to leave.) But I saw weird stuff in that job and gained a lot of experience. I learned how to earn promotions. You had to be incompetent. If you were incompetent in your department, your boss would be admitting she screwed up by hiring you…if she fired you. So, the thing that happened to an incompetent was promotion. The department head did not look bad. The incompetent person was not embarrassed and got a raise. And all the department members who had covered for the incompetent could relax for a while.
Worked for everybody …except, perhaps, the guys upstairs who inherited the problem. I’m not making this up. I saw it happen at least once. And I quit before it could happen again (although I could have used the new salary upstairs).
But what if incompetence starts at the top.
