America’s Self-Inflicted Strategic Threat

Dig.

The political hacks opposing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are laughable — until you realize these hysterics present a serious threat to U.S. national security.

President Dwight Eisenhower’s no longer with us, but we have his National Security Council 162/2 report, dated Oct. 30, 1953. Once top secret, it’s now on the internet.

Ike’s West Point gut told him America faced a long and dreary strategic siege, and to pay for the win, we needed wealth — meaning a long-term productive and growing economy.

MORE:

2022’s hyperinflation and government budget excess exacerbated Washington’s debt problem. Now inflation is embedded in all U.S. economic action, to include military preparedness. Did Joe Biden do it? Yes.

But he did it in league with a criminal enemy: America’s embedded bureaucratic state, an unelected and predominantly Democratic Party caste addicted to self-serving, reckless spending and — until the Trump administration’s DOGE — immune to audit.

Bottom Line: “The unelected bureaucratic state has lost track of five defense budgets.”

RTWDT. Read the whole damn thing.

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

AUTHOR OF GULAG NOW SIDING WITH THE NOMENKLATURA: There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing.

Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.

These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

Earlier today, Steve linked to “George MF Washington’s” Substack about the 1993 movie Dave, in which “Washington” wrote:

“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.

Most importantly, with the movies and TV shows of this era, Progressive Hollywood was telling us “this is how it ought to be… this is how Government should work.” But to watch “Dave” here in the post-Biden era… the era of Trump 2.0… is to realize that what Hollywood really did in the late-90’s, was to set a bunch of traps for itself and then gamely walk right into them thirty years later.

Now we’re up to 1996’s Wag the Dog, which began with a title card that read, “Why does the dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.”

Or to put it another way:

2025 will be the year of deciding who is in charge of Washington, the swamp dwellers, or the president.

Related: Continental Divide. Europeans are starting to realize that their governments are too big. Will Americans catch on next?

Throw your Euro stereotypes out the window: Last weekend, a Greek government that has cut public-sector pay and lowered pensions won a clear victory in local elections. Despite strikes and violence, despite the fact that Greece’s debt is still growing and more cuts are coming, there will be a Socialist mayor of Athens for the first time in 24 years. (And, yes, in Greece, the Socialists favor budget cuts, and the conservatives oppose them.)

Nor are the Greeks alone. Last month, voters re-elected a Latvian government that cut public-sector workers’ pay by 50 percent. The British government coalition, which is also trying to eliminate benefits and cut spending, remains strangely popular, too. Although—contrary to my previous observation—London witnessed its first Continental-style, anti-austerity riot last week, there wasn’t much general enthusiasm for the protesters. Some of their leaders wound up denouncing the riots, and they haven’t hurt the government’s poll numbers yet, either.

It’s saying too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I’m sure there are plenty of European politicians who won’t survive their next encounter with the voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big. They are about to discover that their public spending, which seemed justified in good economic times, has to be cut.

—Anne Applebaum, in the then-still Washington Post-owned Slate, November 15th, 2010.

I liked the that version of Applebaum. What happened in the years since, beyond TDS?

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? NASA says ‘City killer’ asteroid now has 3.1% chance of hitting Earth.

Flashback:

O it’s Elon this, an’ Elon that, an’ “Chuck ‘im out, the cad!”;
But it’s “Elon, please, a rocket!” when the rocks are lookin’ bad.
When the rocks are lookin’ bad, my boys, the rocks are lookin’ bad,
O it’s “Save us, Mr. Elon!” when the rocks are lookin’ bad.

IT’S OKAY: THE LONGER THEY FOCUS ON THIS FALSEHOOD, THE SLOWER THEY’LL CATCH UP TO THE MASSIVE MOVEMENT OF MINORITY VOTERS TO THE GOP:

C’MON, THAT’S AN EASY ONE: Guess Which Wicked Star Will Play Jesus in Hollywood Bowl Production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

We all knew this was coming, right?

In the era of wokeness, it was inevitable that some production would decide to make Jesus a diverse character, and it’s finally happening:

Will she keep her septum piercing while in character?

Exit quote:

Hey, let’s not lose our heads here — there are limits to stunning and braveness.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Whoopi Demands to Know When Was She Consulted on SpaceX-NASA Contracts.

There was a potent and toxic combination of righteous indignation and ignorance oozing from ABC News moderator Whoopi Goldberg, during Tuesday’s edition of The View. In addition to blaming the crash of a Delta Airlines flight on the runway of an airport in Toronto, Canada on Elon Musk, she demanded to know: when did she give permission to NASA to sign contracts with Musk’s SpaceX?

Here you go: Whoopi Goldberg Entertains Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories.

Real Clear Politics, July 20th, 2009.

Incidentally, just a reminder that The View is a production of ABC News.

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: “Dave” and Our Situational Politics.

Viewed from our current turbulent times, the [1993 movie, “Dave”] movie is something of a time capsule. It gives us a glimpse into a more egalitarian, less angry Hollywood, back in the days before the movie business went rabid… when the overriding impulse of the theatrical movie model was to tell stories that appealed to the widest possible swath of Americans… because that, as everyone in the world understood, was how you made real money.

The movie is certainly political, in ways we will get into, but its politics are subtle… it is subtext rather than text. If you were not a hyper-partisan, as most normal Americans were not in those pre-social media days, the politics were so subtle that they amounted to little more than background noise.

“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.

Most importantly, with the movies and TV shows of this era, Progressive Hollywood was telling us “this is how it ought to be… this is how Government should work.” But to watch “Dave” here in the post-Biden era… the era of Trump 2.0… is to realize that what Hollywood really did in the late-90’s, was to set a bunch of traps for itself and then gamely walk right into them thirty years later.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: NYSE Chicago Moving To Dallas. “Chalk up another case of another company in a failing high tax, high regulation, blue-run locale getting the hell out why the getting is good and moving to Texas.”

TIME FOR ‘SPENDING DECISION TREE TRANSPARENCY:’ The first great landmark in proving transparency is Big Government’s worst enemy was the Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA) in 1966. The second was the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) of 2006.

The third should be, according to my latest PJ Media column, creation by Congress and President Donald Trump of web site that enables any citizen with access to the Internet to use the Spending Decision Tree Transparency (SDTT) system that makes public the names, titles and actions of every decision-maker in a series of decisions that results in federal tax dollars being spent.

Yes, it would require a great deal of creative thinking and insight into how government spending decisions are made. But I recall too well not that long ago when the “experts” said there was no way to put all federal spending on the Internet. They were wrong and today we have USASpending.gov, as mandated by FFATA. Why not Spending Decision Tree Transparency.gov?

 

THEY CHOSE IT BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THEY COULD GET AWAY WITH IT:

If my sons ever start to drift leftward — unlikely as that seems — I’ll remind them of the year the government stole from their childhoods.