Personnel is policy. To what extent was Trump himself to blame when he found himself surrounded by backstabbers? And would he be likely to do better, a second time?

Personnel is Policy. To what extent is President Trump to blame for not bringing to Washington a strong cadre of bold, skilled, aggressively loyal supporters, instead allowing the Deep State Hive to constantly laugh behind his back as backstabbers from Chris Christie to Mitch McConnell told him the Senate would approve only appointees who would gleefully, well . . . stab him in the back, slow-walking and obstructing the very policies for which the American public elected him?

Let’s assume for the moment adequate safeguards against massive election fraud (the kind with which the Dembolsheviks and their corporate allies stole the 2020 election from Trump despite his six-figure majorities in almost every battleground state) can be restored.

(Time magazine admits corporate cabal stole the election and are now bragging about it; see:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/02/05/time-magazine-secret-well-funded-cabal-worked-to-protect-2020-election/

. . . or see . . . :

https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2021/02/06/is-it-all-unraveling-after-the-time-magazine-secret-cabal-piece-n323064 )

Given that necessary premise, what are the chances that Donald Trump will have recruited such a cadre of loyal appointees to cover his back the NEXT time?

What are the chances he’d arrive back in Washington with nominees & appointees fully briefed and geared up to replace the thousand (yes, literally a thousand) high-ranking Deep-Staters who need to be fired on his first full day back in office, sweeping clean the administrative offices of the DOJ and FBI and Pentagon, to begin with — and to indict and equip with orange jump-suits and leg irons the NEXT thousand sneering, plotting, disloyal Deep-State scum, the week after that?

For if a President have no power to fire ANY THOUSAND PEOPLE HE CHOOSES in the executive branch on the simple grounds that “I don’t trust ’em. I have no confidence in their loyalty to this adminstration and the stated goals on which we were elected,” then all we’re really electing is some kind of decorative figurehead, limited to dressing fancy, cutting ribbons, and serving sandwiches with the crusts cut off to visiting dignitaries, while the country is really run by Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Bill Gates, and a faceless cabal of New York bankers determined to short silver stocks and Gamestop, confiscate our pension funds, give us a laughing-stock military made-up of transsexual cross-dressers, destroy our energy industry on the premise that all the electricity and diesel fuel we need can be acquired from elves in hollow trees, and export what’s left of our industrial jobs along with our machine tools to their pals in Red China.

Are we ready to accept that?

(Mind you, wer’re not talking about “starting investigations” on Day One. We’re talking about opening the folder and saying, “We’ve done the research, here are the indictments, go arrest them.”)

For without that, why bother? Why invite the same giant pack of treacherous bolshevik squirrels to get right back to their same old nut-cracking schemes? If there’s no price to be paid for Conspiracy to Overthrow the Duly Elected Government of the United States (and nothing concentrates the mind better than seeing your first dozen co-conspirators loosing their bowels as their legs kick the empty air below their gallows), they’re just going to smile and ask “Hey, cool. Do we get to bill time-and-a-half for this?”

WAS DONALD TRUMP NAIVE? BETRAYED BY THOSE HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO TRUST? OR JUST TOO NICE A GUY TO DEPLOY THE BATTLE AXE?

A friend – and Trump supporter – wrote me recently: “My only regret is that (Trump) went into this expecting it to be as in business. Opponents competing for a contract, He got the job and then expected everyone else to make nice and to be able to negotiate and hand out sub contracts. Politics is a completely different ball game. The result was that he didn’t drain anywhere near enough of the swamp fast enough, and kept expecting to be able to make a deal with the traitors. . . . He just kept trying. I really appreciate his perseverance, but in this case, it was misplaced.”

I responded “I believe you’re right about Mr. Trump. I can’t fault him for his single-minded focus on getting elected in 2016. (You couldn’t win that kind of upset by working six- or even 10-hour days.) And that focus surely left him with little time to recruit a competent cohort to take to Washington with him (especially when the most qualified folks would have been reluctant to make any such commitment while the mass media were insisting Trump was a mere public-relations buffoon with no chance of winning.)

“The Decepticons then extorted some kind of deal to have input into his cabinet selections in exchange for not screwing him out of the nomination at the last minute in July,” my response continued. “So I’ll cut him some slack if in mid-November 2016 he suddenly realized he had hundreds (thousands?) of positions to fill, and (assuming the GOP party chiefs were on HIS side) turned for help to . . . Chris Christie? Mitch McConnell? Reince Priebus? Paul Ryan? Mitt Romney’s sister?

“Negotiating to site a new hotel or other development, you know the land owner wants a high purchase price; the union guy wants to featherbed some overpaid guys you don’t really need; the city councilman wants a “campaign contribution,” the Planning and Zoning guys want to muscle you into building them a new elementary school and donating four acres for a park. But the common interest you can find is that at bottom they all want the project BUILT, because the land owner doesn’t want to keep paying property tax on a vacant lot, the union guy doesn’t want his guys to spend the next year sitting around the union hall, your new project will soon start paying city taxes, etc.

“Trump clearly assumed the congresscritters would want carve-outs and set-asides for their favored constituencies, but assumed the underlying common ground was that everyone involved would want the average American worker/voter/family to be more prosperous, for the economy to boom, to stop having our young military people getting their legs blown off in dead-end foreign hellholes, etc.

“Did it take two years for him to realize he was wrong? That the mere presence of ANY outsider who might gain control of ‘his own’ IRS and launch ‘forensic audits,’ proving a huge majority of congresscritters couldn’t POSSIBLY have achieved their current net worth without massive bribes and payoffs – let alone someone who was going to negotiate PRO-AMERICAN trade deals that would cut off their kickbacks from Russia, Ukraine, Red China, screwing up the ‘globalist’ investment strategies of their REAL bosses — Donahue et al. at the U.S. Chamber – was enough in their minds to justify all-out domestic civil war?

“How long did it really take to realize that to protect their ability to keep turning us into servant drones for Red China (in exchange for six-figure payoffs delivered through children, brothers, ex-spouses) they’d actually be willing to organize a sneering, satanic cabal of state-socialist TV networks and “social media” censors to demonize a real-estate developer from Queens (with a Jewish son-in-law, NO record of discrimination in his business enterprises, and in fact a history of substantial campaign contributions to LIBERAL DEMOCRATS) as the Grand Dragon of some kind of new, invisible Ku Klux Klan?

“How long should it really have taken to realize these people were perfectly willing to DESTROY the American economy, DESTROY tens of thousands of small businesses, if by doing so they could get rid of the dreaded, NON-BOUGHT-OFF interloper? That they MAKE MONEY off dead-end foreign wars and couldn’t give a damn if the male children of a bunch of ridiculous peasants out in flyover country get blown up with IEDs while their folks and their bucktooth kid sister back home sing hymns out of some John Ford movie and salute some stupid flag?

“Two years? Maybe. You’d think in his second two years he could/should have swept cleaner with a much bigger axe. But of course Bill Barr kept telling him “It takes time; we’ll round them up and indict them but it all takes time.” While the Bush family swore up and down Bill Barr was a stand-up guy.

Trump accomplishes things precisely because he concentrates his efforts on what CAN be done – China trade, slashing regulations, massaging the tax code to create rewards for moving jobs back into this country. And of course it was their plan to keep him endlessly encumbered with ‘investigations,’ even as McConnell et al. kept telling him the new-broom appointees he wanted would never get ratified by the Senate.”

Not all of Trump’s hires sucked. Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin and the China trade team were stellar. Peter Navarro and Kayleigh McEnany were strong. Mike Pompeo and others displayed normal levels of loyalty.

But the generals – who Trump must have presumed would display to-the-death loyalty to a commander-in-chief almost by reflex – Kelly, Mattis, Mark Milley – soon looked like they were trying out for the “everybody-sticks-in-a-knife” scene in “Julius Caesar.” And if Jeff Sessions wasn’t a traitor in disguise (the jury is still out) he must have been one of the weakest, most gullible Keebler elves ever to spend a full decade in Washington without learning to say “Thanks for advising me to place my testicles in that vice, Tasha. Always appreciate your help. By the way, Security is on the way; you’ve got 15 minutes to load your stuff in a cardboard box and turn in your badge; you’re fired. And if you give me any crap, I’ll hold up your pension in litigation till a transgender astronaut walks on Mars.”

BACK-STABBING? INCOMPETENCE? BOTH?

Peter Navarro’s current reports that Bill Barr’s DOJ was slow-walking anything Trump wanted to do over the past year, while actively preparing the Joe Biden Day One Executive Order blizzard designed to ROLL BACK much of what Trump had accomplished – along with Patrick Byrne’s reports of how disorganized Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to push back against the massive 2020 vote fraud really was – are sobering.

(Peter Navarro – Bill Barr DOJ worked on Joe Biden/Bolshevik agenda even while Trump was still president:

Patrick Byrne on how Team Trump legal effort to combat election fraud was bungled. (Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn come off well; Rudy Giuliani does not):

. . . or see . . .

https://www.deepcapture.com/2021/01/november-3-december-23-all-the-presidents-teams/ )

No, Trump couldn’t do it all single-handed. He needed loyal subordinates to whom he could delegate, who could & would take some pro-active initiative, even while keeping him informed. His tweets reveal he clearly knew by the summer of 2020 that mass mail-in vote fraud was planned. He had no domestic intelligence from the FBI (well no, from Chris Wray? Of course not), from the RNC (from Red Chinese agent Mr. Elaine Chao and from Mitt Romney’s sister? Well no, of course not), from the NSA, from military Intelligence, that could have pinpointed Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Northern Virginia?

Yes, the (then) eight worthless pieces of shit once known as “the Supreme Court” had a chance to accept a pertfectly valid lawsuit out of Pennsylvania in October, BEFORE THE ELECTION — properly protesting the fact that major changes in state election procedures, designed to allow mass mail-in ballot fraud (accepting ballots up to three days after the election EVEN WITHOUT POSTMARKS?) had been adopted WITHOUT BEING APPROVED BY THE COMMONWEALTH LEGISLATURE, AS REQUIRED BY THE U.S. CONSTITUTION — and refused to hear the case.

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2020-10-28/supreme-court-in-blow-to-trump-allows-absentee-ballot-extensions-in-north-carolina-and-pennsylvania

But would it really have been impossible for the White House to air televised show-and-tells at that point, detailing the Latin American background of the software used in lots of today’s electronic vote-manipulation machines (initially designed to help Venezuelan dictators win fraudulent elections), the fact that they’re designed to connect to the Internet, the fact that their manufacturers’ own training videos tell “administrators” how to send a certain percentage of ballots to be “adjudicated” somewhere off-site — free of oversight by poll-watchers of either party?

Would it really have been impossible to dispatch squads of armed federal marshals to each of those eight or 10 targeted urban vote-counting centers, ready to make sure GOP observers were allowed close enough to actually see (and approve or reject) each ballot, as required by state law, NO EXEMPTIONS JUSTIFIED BY COVID-19 HAVING BEEN ENACTED BY THE STATE LEGISLATURES, AS REQUIRED BEFORE BEING CONSIDERED VALID UNDER THE U.S. CONSTITUTION?

Would it really have been impossible to park flatbed trucks with generators and bright lights on poles outside each of those vote-counting centers, surrounding each of those sites with floodlights and TV cameras 24/7, with additional rotating squads of DOJ attorneys with blank warrants ready to make arrests OF THE SCOFFLAW COUNTY EMPLOYEES for Interfering With a Federal Election – especially of any van driver showing up with boxes of ballots but no chain-of-custody documents at 3 a.m. . . . staging off-the-cuff press conferences as the crooked election workers were led out and loaded in the prison vans, in handcuffs and leg irons . . .

. . . while the highly suspicious ballots (mismatched paper stocks? Never folded to fit in a mail-in envelope? All marked for Biden with no other races checked, which is a statistical impossibility? Dozens or hundreds “signed” in the same handwriting? Dozens or hundreds from “voters” who supposedly all live in the same apartment or vacant lot?) were seized and locked away in federal evidence lockers, with random samples pulled out for forensic laboratory examination?

Let THEM sue HIM for overreaching. Let THEM claim HE somehow “stole the election” from a bribed-up senile bumbler who can no longer feed himself Gerber’s tapioca pudding with a spoon, who spent the whole campaign hiding in his basement.

So why didn’t that happen? Because no one in the supposed “Trump administration” saw the fraud coming, none of them could figure out any way to fight back? No. At this point I don’t harbor much doubt that they did see, they did know. (Heck, Democrat consultants were publishing Op-ed pieces predicting Trump would appear to win on election night, but that the (fake, mass-produced, never even folded to be placed in an envelope) “mail-in” ballots would swing the election to Bribed-Up Biden a few days later, See:

https://www.rt.com/usa/499709-mail-voting-election-fraud/

. . . or see . . . :

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/red-mirage )

No, the Bolsheviks tipped their hand, but Trump’s own staff, following a four-year pattern of obstruction, did their best to KEEP THE ACCURACY OF THAT PLANNED-VOTE-FRAUD REVELATION FROM DONALD TRUMP, because they wanted him destroyed.

How else to explain the unmistakeable shock when Trump announced in the wee hours of Nov. 4 “We were up by more than 100,000 votes in each of those states. We were getting ready for a celebration. What the heck?”

That was not acting. That was the pain the deeply un-American Deep State — and the sadistic traitors who he thought had his back — WANTED to inflict on a man who gave up his peaceful and affluent retirement, knew he’d be sacrificing $2 billion in net worth in order to suffer four years of rabid, schizophrenic abuse, for no reason but his hope that he could restore America’s pride, security, prosperity, and energy independence.

Are they proud, now, when they jingle their 30 pieces of silver in their pockets?

The level of betrayal on the part of federal employees who OWED TRUMP their loyalty – or at least had a duty to do their JOBS and inform him of what was going on – is beyond anything we’ve yet grasped. The man would have been better served by firing every employee in the White House, in the DOJ and the FBI, and importing 120,000 anti-Communists from Hungary and Poland. At least they’d know how to recognize the enemy. And most of them probably would have spoken better English.

(Has-been actor Tim Matheson — “Otter” Stratton in “Animal House,” 1976 — said in January he was glad America would again have a first lady who “can speak English.” English — which she speaks intelligently, with an impressive vocabulary albeit with an noticeable accent — is Melania Trump’s fifth language, after her native Slovenian, after her acquired German, Italian, and French, Old Tim. We would enjoy hearing Old Tim say “Please help me, I believe I’m having a heart attack” in his fifth language. His fourth? His third? Oh dear. What did the gentleman say? His color doesn’t look at all good.

Meantime, how well does the caregiver and handler of the senile geriatric bribe hustler Joe Biden — “doctor Jill” — do when called upon to charm visiting dignatries in French, in German, or in Italian? You don’t suppose having a stunning fashion model, a brilliant woman who made her first million ON HER OWN, fluent in five languages, was ever a help to our President on the international stage? Better to have our Diplomat-in-Chief be a guy who explodes into sudden fits of temper when contradicted, thundering at shocked questioners that they’re “lying dog-faced pony soldiers” and challenging them to a wretsling match out behind the barn?)

(Leaked email reveals how RINOs flubbed Michigan ground-game on election Night:)

If Trump comes back – which he surely could, if they can clean up the bulk of this wholesale election fraud, the mass “mail-in” (without postmarks!) ballots, the Internet-connected vote-manipulation machines that send up to 65 percent of ballots to be “adjudicated” somewhere overseas – will he arrive with a couple thousand qualified replacement managers with whips in hand? Not bright-eyed 20-somethings, but experienced veterans of these agencies who were purged for Wrong Thinking during the first couple years of the Obama takeover, now willing to come back and serve a few more years, so that on his first full day he can fire the top 150 people at DOJ, the top 150 people at FBI, the top 150 people at Homeland Security, at CIA, everyone above the rank of full Colonel in the Pentagon . . . ?

Merely appointing a “Secretary” and two deputies into the executive suite on the top floor to cut ribbons and make speeches and believing you’ve thus turned that huge ant farm on the lower floors into a “Trump DOJ” or an FBI that will “go after the seditious criminals of the Deep State and the Left” is absurd. If it’s the last remaining alternative before turning these buildings into lakes of flat glass via the non-gradual release of thermonuclear energy, SOMEONE’s got to arrive in Washington with several thousand sets of leg irons and matching orange jump suits.

If you can think of a third way, feel free to let me know. A federal workforce that votes 97 percent “radical feminist trans-gender Global-Warming Black-Lies-Matter slavery-reparation Democrat” is NOT representative of the American public they sneeringlty pretend to serve, but actually revile and ridicule as knuckle-dragging hayseeds.

By now, Trump surely knows his way around the “Senate won’t confirm” game. You appoint Lin Wood as Attorney General. The Senate refuses to confirm? Fine, Sidney Powell becomes “acting” AG for eight months, during which time she fires 3,000 Never-Trump saboteurs, replacing them with Texans . . . and some Poles and Hungarians. At which point you nominate HER for the permanent AG slot.

Senate turns her down? Fine. As the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is being hauled away for tax evasion and serving as an unregistered agent of Red China, your next “acting” attorney General is Vlad the Impaler. They turn down your nominee to head (and hose out) the CIA? Fine Gen. Michael Flynn becomes “acting” head of the CIA for eight months, during which time he fires 4,200 Never-Trump squirrels and saboteurs, replacing them with fire teams from the Special Forces, who bring their Squad Automatic Weapons to staff meetings.

Of course, to do this, you’d have to be ready for the Supreme Court to order you to reinstate some of those sneering Strzok-style traitors, at which point Trump would have to be ready to paraphrase Andy Jackson, when the Supreme Court ruled in 1832 that neither the state of Georgia nor the federal government could push the Cherokee off their lands, that “Justice Roberts has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

Though Trump would have much MORE justification for telling the SCOTUS where to stick it, of course. Justice Marshall was right about the civilized tribes, but nowhere in the Constitution is the court delegated any authority to tell the President how to run the CO-EQUAL executive branch, which can include firing everyone in it. The Civil Service Act was supposed to protect elevator operators and bean-counters in green eyeshades, not communist saboteurs. (And if it’s found to do the latter, the Civil Service Act itself is clearly an unconstitutional violation of the Separation of Powers, and should be ignored until such time as it can be dumpstered.)

The question is – especially since Donald Trump, despite all this hysterical invective, is at heart a Pretty Nice Guy – would he, in a hypothetical second term, have the balls to really wade in and go to work with a battle axe, knowing full well the corporate/collectivist media will shriek “Friday night massacre! He wants to rule like a Russian Czar! He’s decimating these fine agencies against the wishes of Congress! Thousands of government employees who live in million-dollar Montgomery County mansions and who’ve been making six-figure salaries for years will starve! What of the CHILLLDREN? Will the starving, trembling waifs find no Christmas presents under the TREE this year?”

We have no right to DEMAND Donald Trump do this. He’s 74 years old. He has the right to spend a few peaceful years with his grandchildren, if he likes, and would still deserve a nation’s gratitude for doing such a good job of exposing the nest of vicious parasites who now swarm the nation’s capital like disease-carrying roaches.

But who else you got?

6 Comments to “Personnel is policy. To what extent was Trump himself to blame when he found himself surrounded by backstabbers? And would he be likely to do better, a second time?”

  1. Kevin Says:

    Vin,
    I think it’s worse than that. FDR filled government positions with people he had blackmail files on from when he was secretary of the Navy. So I think the government Deep State types probably had sleepers around Donald Trump for a couple of Decades just for this moment. With his personal drive and charisma they probably considered it likely he would run for office at some point so they kept multiple contingencies in place.

  2. Henry Says:

    Trump made crap hiring decisions over and over. The sad part is that many of us in his constituency knew they were crap well before they were made, but were ignored. Gun owners, in particular, knew that both Sessions and Barr were swamp creatures from their histories on gun laws, but Trump hired them anyway. About the only traitor the gun owners didn’t smoke out ahead of time was Pence, who had no such record.

  3. Henry Says:

    I’ll correct my statement. Amy Coney Barrett had us fooled as well, although Kavanaugh did not.

  4. Henry Says:

    I’ll correct my statement. Amy Coney Barrett had us fooled as well, though Kavanaugh did not. (Sorry if this is a dup, but it looks like it got lost.)

  5. Vince Says:

    Absolutely brilliant Vin! The hands down best summation of Trump’s presidency with the added bonus of a ‘how to fix it’ which is crucial to the story.

    You’ve hit it on the head square enough that it seems likely to be the reason the bad guys are going after Trump with a view to discredit a 2024 run with this absurd scampeachment currently on sale everywhere in the pravda media.

  6. Vin Says:

    A correspondent asks if Trump’s own personality couldn’t have contributed to his betrayal by a fair number of his own appointees. I believe the answer is probably “Yes, but with an important addendum”:

    Trump is a real estate developer, and a promoter. He thinks big, he quickly grasps the UNDERLYING problem, and he’s willing to take big gambles. That personality type can seem flighty, over-the-top, mercurial, maybe even “unreliable” to those who are more accustomed to government administrators playing it safe, plodding steadily ahead down the beaten path, not rocking the boat, moving with caution and deliberation and inside-baseball cleverness after having spent decades mastering the intricasies and conflicting interests inside the bureaucracy. . . .

    But — even though no one has bombed Pearl Harbor of late — America is in a crisis which challenges our very survival as a beacon of freedom in the world, RIGHT NOW.

    Over the past 50 years, our mandatory coersion-baed youth propaganda camps (“public schools”) have been taken over by socialist revolutionatries desperate to indoctrinate our younger generation in the doctrines of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Alinsky, and Barry the Stoner — insisting that any supposed “progress” introduced by white male Christians since about the year 1700 is just racist slave-owner crap that needs to be renounced and repealed As Soon As Possible.

    The hard-assed men who reported the Second World War from the front lines having died off, our corporate media is now largely staffed with pretty young Irish girls with turned-up noses and perky hairstyles who wouldn’t have a clue how to tell their Wall Street corporate masters, “No, I don’t think what you’re asking me to read here is really very balanced, or even true. I’m going to call Sidney Powell or Tom Sowell or Tom Fitton or John Lott or John Eastman or Victor Davis Hanson or somebody at Hillsdale College and get a detailed rebuttal and add that below this boilerplate state-socialist tripe you’ve just handed me, so you’d better figure this segment is going to last about an extra 90 seconds” — even if they could imagine any reason they SHOULD take such a stand.

    I mean, is that going to help them land that high-profile plum assignment, narrating the documentary on how all Trump supporters are White Supremacists just yearning for the chance to get back to lynching black folk?

    To lead the fight to win back America from these alternately screeching and simpering harridans — with zero experience trying to pay the taxes while making a living out in Flyover Country and thus so easily manipulated by banker and politician bosses busy feathering their personal billion-dollar nests by selling us down the river to the REALLY murderous, REALLY intolerant, REALLY racist, REALLY homophobic Iranian mullahs and Red Chinese potentates, . . . who would you rather have in the White House — a plodding, predictable, steady, slow-moving, jumped-up office manager who systematically works his way through his in-box while ignoring all those flashing red lights and alarm bells . . .

    Or a Donald Trump, moving from one topic, one inspiration, one vision, to another at a pace that dizzies his staff? Isn’t brilliance, vision, inspiration, direction, high energy, enthusiasm, a refusal to accept “That can’t be done becauswe it’s never been done before” or “That’s not the way we do things; these things take years” precisely what we NEED in a leader?

    Of course that approach can seem frightening, unsettling, disorganized, to people who’ve spent 40 years working their way gradually up through the bureaucracy (including the Pentagon) by moving stacks of papers from the In Box to the Out Box, getting all the little boxes checked on their own resumes without ever ruffling any feathers.

    But my important addendum is, while Trump’s approach and free-market, entrepreneurial personality may have upset and disturbed some who came to his administration with MIXED LOYALTIES UNDISCLOSED, figuring their job was to rein him in, to “Stop Trump from Being Trump,” it’s the JOB OF THE STAFF to translate the boss’s mercurial flashes of brilliance and vision and enthusiasm and guidance INTO POLICY. We don’t need a Jimmy Carter, who finally resolved the squabbles over who could use the White House tennis courts at what hour by TAKING PERSONAL CHARGE OF THE WHITE HOUSE TENNIS COURT SCHEDULE. It’s the Chief of Staff and his deputies who are supposed to take note of what the Big Guy wants done, and then make the followup call:

    “Hi, Mircalla, it’s been a week since the Big Guy told you to get on that problem we discussed and come up with a couple of proposed solutions, and we haven’t heard back. How’s it going? Well, no, I wouldn’t say ‘The President has forgotten all about it.’ What I would dasy is he’s got a hundred other things that he has to deal with on a crisis basis, and he and I are ready to provide you with more guidance once we get your report. So what have you accomplished? OK, hang on there, Mercy, no, no, listen for a second, SHUT UP. I’ll take it from all that throat clearing that your answer is basically ‘Nothing.’ So here’s the deal, Mercy: it’s now 2 p.m. on Friday, I’ve got that deal with the ambassador at 7, but I’ll be back here at my desk at 10 tonight; I want you to call me then to report what you’ve accomplished in the next eight hours; call the kitchen and have them send you up a sandwich, no beer. Then I expect you to spend 12 to 14 hours on this tomorrow, and when you come in here to meet with me and the Big Guy at 8 a.m. Monday I want either three really dynamite solutions — annotated with three authorities who back each solution, along with a thorough list of the potential DOWN sides of each, or else a nice letter from you explaning how you really need to move back to Bucks County and spend more time with your family. Get it?”

    Rather than going on TV and whining that the greatest American president since Andrew Jackson is some kind of fruitcake because he wouldn’t take orders from YOU, . . . you simpering eunuchs.

    — V.S.