Posts Tagged → beltway
Will Pam Bondi cut it as AG?
Earlier today, former congressman Matt Gaetz stepped down as nominee for US Attorney General. The ridiculous scandal created around him drove him out. Within about six hours, President Trump announced that former Florida AG Pam Bondi was the next up nominee. And I do not have a good feeling about this selection.
Here is why: If you are trying to re-enter enemy territory and bring law and order to the Biden DOJ chaos, you are best served by having someone who is aggrieved. Someone like Kash Patel, who served in the Pentagon and as Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief of staff and investigator into the DOJ’s fake Russia Hoax scandal aimed at Trump. You are best served by someone who knows where the skeletons are buried and where the bad guys are hiding, and who is personally invested in fixing it.
Pam Bondi could easily be another Amy Coney Barrett, a moderate sheep sold in conservative clothing, who promised to act like a sheriff, but who ended up being a spineless liberal do-nothing on the Supreme Court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also turned out to be a cute soccer mom, more interested in DC elbow rubbing than in implementing constitutionally sound legal decisions. America cannot survive with more of this kind of weak personality in leadership positions. The rot is too deep and too broad, and only the very meanest, toughest crime fighters will succeed in righting the listing ship.
My fear is that Pam Bondi will not want to rock the boat by making aggressive moves on big name crime figures, like Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland. Rather, she is likely to go after the second tier personalities, and only a few at that. People like Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein, maybe Jim Comey or Chris Wray. My fear is that she she will have a few big dog and pony circus show cases, and puff out her chest and strut around like she has done something. Letting all the myriad bad guys off the hook.
What DC and America need is a Batman, a caped crusader, someone so personally angry and hurt by the last eight years of cruel, lawless injustice, that he will stop at nothing to bring everyone to justice. That means the Merrick Garlands and the junior DOJ prosecutors too, everyone who all engaged in criminal prosecutorial misconduct. And whomever is responsible for the professional murder of Jeffrey Epstein inside a jail cell. And whoever left the fake bombs outside the DNC and RNC on January 6th. And and and….
Doors have to be kicked in at 4AM, tons of bad guys have to be trotted out cuffed in their underwear, and as much prosecution as can be dreamt up must be dumped on every. single. one. of these bad people who have wrecked America over the past eight years.
Pam Bondi. Someone this pretty probably isn’t going to be as tough as America needs. Photo credit CNN
Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt it. If nothing else, one hopes that President Trump has explained to Pam Bondi what his exact expectations are, and what the short timeline looks like for her implementation. We cannot have another Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr situation, where people who are entrusted with everything do absolutely nothing. And we also cannot have another situation where the AG does something, but not everything that must be done.
Batman, where are you?
America needs a caped crusader US Attorney General to bring tough justice to Washington DC criminals. Credit DC Comics (ironically)
DOGE
Tonight I was inspired to send a DM to the folks managing the DOGE page on X. Not necessarily because I have thought all the time about ways to make government efficient or better (though I have written essays about it at American Thinker), but because over the years and last few weeks I have tried to reach out to some of my former US EPA colleagues in DC.
And not one has responded.
These people were close friends when we were young. We worked together, we socialized together, we watched each other get raises and promotions, cheered each other getting married, then have kids, etc. And over the last 27 years since I left DC I would occasionally get an itch to talk with some of them, and I would email and call. Some of my old friends came and visited me, fished with me, hung out around the campfire. It was fantastic.
To say that most of my phone calls were returned would be untrue. That many of the conversations were odd or forced would not be an understatement. I think most of my former DC friends viewed me as a traitor, or worse, some kind of infidel or crazy man, for leaving federal service and Washington DC. Really. I mean this. That is how tightly the horse blinders are on the people living there; they really cannot relate to most of the Americans outside of the Beltway.
Lately I have been trying to reach my old friend Paul. Paul did well. Went from EPA to NIH. He too won’t respond in kind. Just silence. I guess being a GS 15 in DC means you are automatically at the top of the American hierarchy, and above people in Flyover Country, too important to stoop so low. Even to connect with former close friends who helped you with your career. No condescending to speak with us lowlives, us worker ants, us neandethals. And yes, these epithets are indeed how many, many DC Beltway government apparatchiks view Americans outside the Beltway. Those of us toiling away in the dirt, with dirt under our finger nails. Grubby.
And so while my heart hurts from being ignored by people I had felt great affection for, and who I naturally expected to receive it in turn from, the pain reminded me of why Trump was elected, and just how cancerous, arrogant, uncaring, and out of touch the federal government has become in all of its heavy handedness and overlording it on us little people. And how effing spoiled brat entitled and unaccountable so so many federal bureaucrats have become.
So, thanks guys, my dear old friends, for inspiring me to reach out to the Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are taking volunteers to help take a meat cleaver to the bloated federal bureaucracy I fled from. If there is one thing I have gotten very good at, it is volunteering. God knows, someone has to help fix what so much bad government has screwed up, and like cleaning up old tires in a trout stream, you can’t fix what is broken without volunteers. People who wade into the muck and get covered in mud to make the trout stream clean and habitable once again.
So…Private First reporting for duty, Captains Ramaswamy and Musk. Chainsaw, bulldozer, dynamite, chisel, sledgehammer or screwdriver, whatever is needed to help dismantle the out of control DC bureacucracy, I can do it. I know it all too well.
UPDATE: Apparently the power of the word is still great, because my old friend Paul called me. And we had a lovely conversation. Yes, he voted for Kamala, and I voted for Trump, but still, we were able to talk about our kids, our careers, our patient wives. There is hope for America.
Cantor loss is shocking only to those who are not paying attention
Yes, yes, yes, Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) was an important man, high up, famous, powerful…blah blah blah. And he lost his five-million dollar primary campaign to a grass roots candidate who spent a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Hey, Republican establishment folks, are you now paying attention?
Do you maybe now understand what so many of your own voters have been telling you for years?
To wit: America is worth saving, and it can only be saved by breaking from the creeping Big Government identity of “moderate” Republicans. That means No on amnesty, No on gun control, No on universal background checks aka gun owners database, No on ObamaDon’tCare.
In other words, Hell Yes on freedom and liberty.
Cantor failed on these issues, and his voters punished him for it.
While the NRA lost out to Gun Owners of America in this race, probably no group was more closely identified with Cantor, and the Republican establishment around him, than the Republican Jewish Coalition, a nice group I have had some exposure to. Sadly, RJC mishandled Cantor’s loss in a gargantuan way that may spell the organization’s descent or even demise. In many ways, Tuesday night’s RJC is emblematic of the larger Republican establishment, which also seems determined to drive itself over a cliff.
Late Tuesday night, 11:26 PM, to be exact, the RJC issued a brief lamentation about Cantor’s electoral loss and how great Cantor was and blah blah blah.
Did RJC acknowledge that REPUBLICAN voters had spoken? Nope. Did RJC congratulate the winner, economics professor David Brat? Nope. Did RJC publicly stake out hopes for Brat to follow closely in Cantor’s pro-Israel shoes? Nope.
Instead, RJC came across as soundly rejecting the wisdom of REPUBLICAN voters in Cantor’s former district, and failing to acknowledge the Big Government issues of a) gun (citizen) control and b) illegal aliens, who are destroying American democracy, disenfranchising American voters, and robbing American taxpayers.
RJC may be a small group with great intentions, but Tuesday night, they were the lost voice for the entire Republican Establishment. And it shows just how out of touch the establishment is with the American citizen. Every conservative activist who reads the RJC statement will wonder what the hell is in the DC Beltway water, because it sure isn’t anything they’d want to drink.
The folks who ran and funded Cantor’s campaign, who issued public statements for him, who stood by him when he wafted in the wind on critical issues, and who bewailed his loss, are incredibly out of touch with the actual voters, taxpayers, citizens, moms, dads, students, and out-of-work-car-won’t-run Americans who are slowly, surely, awakening to the crisis we are in, and who are not not shocked that Cantor lost.
But the experts…they are shocked.
What does this portend or mean to Pennsylvanians? Here is one suggestion: Political parties are supposed to represent the voters and stand for principles. Once the PA GOP returns to that model, winning elections will be easy.