Three more years to go and then the title will be “A full term in office for Trump.” Would anyone like to wager whether that happens? I’m thinking it will be amazing if he lasts that long. He might get pushed out by Republicans, or impeached by Democrats, or he might just walk away to spend more time with his family. Why anyone in the last years of their life would want to put up with the nuttiness that comes with being the President of the United States is beyond me.
At this point, it seems that Trump is content to fight back against those that would like to defeat him. How long will he want to fight? Why does he want to fight? Will he continue to view everyone as a potential enemy? Probably. Will he continue to pick a fight with everyone? Absolutely. Will insiders continue to align with Trump’s real and imagined enemies? Regrettably, that answer is also yes.
And, who are those insiders? The Justice Department seems to be infested with insiders who work against Trump. They appointed their own employees to investigate Trump and they chose people who actively worked to derail the election process. Justice personnel covered up the crimes of one candidate and fabricated crimes about the other candidate, and they did this during the election. And then, the Justice Department assigned these same people to investigate the very candidate they actively worked to defeat.
Many people cringed when Trump led campaign chants that called for Hillary to be locked up. In America, we don’t jail opposition candidates or have them killed. But, in America, we also don’t expect our justice system to choose sides. Justice must be a non-partisan organization, and individually, its employees must also remain non-partisan. It is clear that biased Justice employees thrived in an environment that was highly partisan. How did an exception become the rule?
It is easy to blame the previous Justice leaders and supervisors. In fact, who else can be blamed? These biased high-level Justice Department personnel advanced to the upper levels through a largely non-competitive process. Lower levels government positions are earned, but not the upper levels. Upper-level personnel advance to their positions through political patronage and not merit, and this is not unique to the current or previous administration. The Bush administration sent incompetent personnel to Iraq after it fell and Iraq is still dealing with the mistakes they made.
So, should Justice Department employees be screened against some standard of fairness? Who would develop that standard and who would administer the test? And, when the next administration assumes power will they create their own version of the test and eliminate personnel who don’t measure up to their standard of fairness? I don’t think a standard is possible. We are all human, and those that create a test are human, and that means even the best effort will result in a flawed product. Personnel will incorrectly be screened out and some of those that should leave will probably be missed.
Donald Rumsfield said, “…you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” We have a flawed Justice Department and we can accept that as a fact when it comes to low-level employees; however, those at the top need to be fired. New leaders must change the biased culture of the Justice Department because the tone of the office environment is established by leaders, not the employees.
Most of us first heard of the Clintons when they began their race to the White House. In 1992 they gave their first interview to 60 Minutes and she let everyone see a little of the darkness inside her heart. When Hillary said, “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she let us know she was different. Hillary didn’t just sit next to “her man,” Hillary began destroying women who had anything to do with “her man.”
Maybe she can be forgiven for having an extra glass of wine and falling asleep during Obama’s State of the Union speech to Congress. It was a snoozer even without alcohol. But I assume Justice Ginsburg was sober and awake when she attacked a presidential candidate twice this past week. Really? A supposedly nonpartisan body of government should not get involved in a blatantly partisan body of government. These are the guidelines all third graders learn about when they are introduced to our form of government.
Dreams of My Sons' Father 