Monday, November 11, 2019

David Stockman on How the Deep State Really Works

Via Billy

Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin. And How to Bring It Back: David A. Stockman

International Man: Last year, President Trump took the unusual step of bypassing his advisors to announce his intention to withdraw all US troops from Syria quickly. The decision rattled Washington and the mainstream media. It caused former Defense Secretary Mattis to resign. Almost a year later, the US has withdrawn only a token number of soldiers. It still has thousands of troops occupying the part of the country where oil fields are located. What is going on here?

David Stockman: Well, that’s the Deep State at work.

Donald Trump is all by his lonesome. He’s home alone in the Oval Office. Now, half of it, he can blame himself. If he hires someone, a known idiot like John Bolton, what does he expect is going to happen except that everything he wanted to do is going to be undermined.

Nevertheless, he can’t seem to find anybody who can articulate on a day-to-day basis a pathway to the more restrained America First posture that he had in mind.

He’s surrounded by people who constantly countermand his orders.

More @ LCR

4 comments:

  1. there is a method to hiring good people. not necessarily the best people, but good enough an organization. If you don't know the players well enough to understand their motivations but you need people to do your bidding, you hire them. if they don't work out the way you expected, fire them and hire the next in line. lather rinse repeat.
    people who do not make mistakes learn nothing. people who learn nothing from making mistakes need to be replaced. leaders who demand perfection in their followers are fools looking hard for the next place to fail hard.
    Highly educated people are not necessarily the the most qualified for many organization positions. Highly educated people firmly believe that they never make mistakes because they are highly educated and know best what others should do. Highly educated people like to work in government because it allows them to practice what they believe the governed should do without any repercussions to themselves. we call them Bureaucrats. High levels of education creates a person with a rigid set of beliefs in how other people should react to what the highly educated person wants/says/believes/requires of them.
    A leader could be looking for highly EXPERIENCED people who have been thru the learning process of experience and thoroughly understand the price of perfection and zero tolerance for error. Experience teaches one to have flexibility in expectations they set for others because people are not fixed in their attitudes and desires. things change and shit happens. Observe the results of eight years of Obama(the smartest man in DC it had been said) had on the bureaucracy of government.
    If you understand what the above means, you understand why President Trump has a few granola people on the payroll and how, given enough time, he weeds them out. He ends up with those that may not be the sharpest blades in the sheaths but then, they are not the dullest, either.
    after almost seventy years of dealing with humans, I have to conclude that best is often the dire enemy of good enough.

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    1. Thanks. https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2019/11/comment-on-david-stockman-on-how-deep.html#comment-form

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    2. Brock, I have a grudge with a federal program called "senior executive service". it is a program designed to bypass federal employee pay caps to retain highly educated and paid bureaucrats in the government.
      I call it the heart and soul of the Swamp.
      SES is at the heart of what we now call "The Swamp".

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    3. I didn't know about that.Thanks. I was in the civil service in Vietnam after my 21 months in the Army there ending in the embassy until the end.I like to say, like the fishing saying, "10% of the men do 90% of the work."

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