Said Stephen Miller, at yesterday's press briefing.
ADDED: In the same vein, here's Victor Davis Hanson:Want to see a murder?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025
Libs in the White House press corps screamed at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that Elon Musk is “unelected!”
What happens next is a fatality.
I promise you - this is the single best video on the internet today:pic.twitter.com/Nxcw0qTtj1
"We don't really appreciate what we've been through with eight years of the Obama revolution and the four-year, more radical third term of Obama using or employing the wax effigy of Joe Biden. A revolution that we've experienced was a cultural, economic, political, social revolution. It was very similar to the French Revolution under the Robespierre brothers. You should remember what they tried to do. They changed the days of the week. They renamed things. They tore down statues. They went after the churches. Does this sound familiar? … So this was a revolutionary movement. Movies were different. Sports were different. Take a knee. And Donald Trump came in and it was not sufficient to say we’re going to stop the madness of $37 billion. … It’s a return to normalcy. It’s a return to common sense. It only looks revolutionary to revolutionaries. But to the rest of the people, it is a counterrevolution to restore normalcy and bring the country from the far-left fringes back home again."
I've quoted from Hanson's transcript, which says "normalcy," but he's saying "normalacy." I don't see that as a word, so I'm assuming he's adopting a strange pronunciation of "normalcy," which is a very interesting word in political discourse and one that I blogged about back in 2023, in "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy'...":
[From] the transcript of yesterday's DeSantis event... "We must return normalcy to our communities."
Normalcy! I can see wanting to resonate with Reagan and JFK... but Warren G. Harding? Here you have one of the famously bad Presidents, and the word is absolutely associated with Harding.
Harding said: "America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration."
Hanson is even more clearly echoing Harding. He's arguing that what Trump is doing is not revolution but restoration.
My 2023 post continues:
From the "Back to Normalcy" chapter of the 1931 classic "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s":
[Harding's] liabilities were not at first so apparent, yet they were disastrously real. Beyond the limited scope of his political experience he was “almost unbelievably ill-informed,” as William Allen White put it. His mind was vague and fuzzy. Its quality was revealed in the clogged style of his public addresses, in his choice of turgid and maladroit language (“non-involvement” in European affairs, “adhesion” to a treaty), and in his frequent attacks of suffix trouble (“normalcy” for normality, “betrothment” for betrothal). It was revealed even more clearly in his helplessness when confronted by questions of policy to which mere good nature could not find the answer. White tells of Harding’s coming into the office of one of his secretaries after a day of listening to his advisers wrangling over a tax problem, and crying out: “John, I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! what a job!” His inability to discover for himself the essential facts of a problem and to think it through made him utterly dependent upon subordinates and friends whose mental processes were sharper than his own.
In the transcript, DeSantis only said "normalcy" once — and never "normality." He also said "normal" twice:If there’s no accountability over any individual or entity of course they’re going to behave differently than if you have normal accountability.... My grandfather worked in the steel mill in western Pennsylvania. I just know instinctively what normal people think about all this stuff. I have a good sense of when the legacy media and the left are outside of where the average American is....I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying"normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."
For a longer version of that ["Lolita"] quote, read my post from June 2010, "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves." The post title is a quote from Michelle Obama. There was also this quote from Maureen Dowd: "Of the many exciting things about Barack Obama’s election, one was the anticipation of a bracing dose of normality in the White House.”
That was back when the abnormality was George W. Bush. The idea of a President as weird as Donald Trump was nowhere in sight. It's hard even to remember what was supposedly so un-normal about Bush. Remember when his brother Jeb stood on the debate stage next to Trump and pathetically relied on the assumption that we'd have to pick him over that unacceptably weird guy Trump? It didn't work, though it worked when Joe Biden stood on the debate stage next to Trump and argued, essentially, you'll have to take me over Trump because I'm the only thing here that approaches normality? That did work though.
Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again.
Looking back, the weirdest President turned out to be Biden, whose only selling point was a promise of normality. He did not keep that promise. Oddly enough, he sounds like that description of Harding: "His inability to discover for himself the essential facts of a problem and to think it through made him utterly dependent upon subordinates and friends whose mental processes were sharper than his own."
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65 comments:
I watched this live. Hoo-ray. I hope they are successful…
Who’s gonna win? Trump or the bureaucracy? Trump or the Deep State? Does Trump have a strategy for winning in mind?
Truth.
Yes, put that on a loop for the world to see.
…in my mind he also said at the end- ‘Now all of you leave here and go eat a bag of dicks…’
DEI (i.e. systemic, institutional class-disordered ideologies), yes. Also, dark money through redistributive change schemes that are an equivocal and inclusive forward-looking "burden" for everyone. Thus the chainsaw... scalpel used to mitigate progressive corruption and other nonviable conditions.
Had a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment while trying to login to comment. It seems Discus is no longer used and you need to use a Google sign in. It also seems you need to use the MicroSoft browser. I am not certain if this was done from above by Blogger or not but reading the current comments a lot of the normal, and better, commentors are missing.
When psychopaths and anarchists try to rule they can never agree on the rules. It always ends with infighting and/or corruption.
Still, a distressingly large percentage of our population loves the Dark Brandon, David Hogg approach to government.
New word...
Bureausurpation: when bureaucrats usurp the power of the president.
@Shouting Thomas - I had serious doubts Trump could make progress on those fronts, but after his first month in office it's clear he has a plan and is prepared for all possible contingencies.
Stephen Miller may be the best communicator in the Trump Admin. Which is saying something.
Not surprisingly, the MSM has absolutely no stories on this. To the contrary, to keep its (small) viewership ignorant, CNN cut away from this answer.
SoLastMillennium said...
Had a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment ...
I do not believe that Althouse has ever used disqus for her comments, always blogger. This is a Google product and requires a Google identity to comment. I've used many browsers here, but never one by Microsoft. Commenters come and they go. I agree that these are not always the best of times, but I take the good with the less good.
…contrast this with the Psaki and Jon Stewart bloggingheads of yesterday where Jen has the startling revelation the Democrats have lost the House Senate Presidency and Judiciary…and that revelation feels like progress.
"It seems Discus is no longer used and you need to use a Google sign in."
Google to sign in has been the situation here for years. I did it to try to deal with trolls.
{It also seems you need to use the MicroSoft browser."
Not so. I use Safari and Chrome and can comment just fine.
"I am not certain if this was done from above by Blogger or not but reading the current comments a lot of the normal, and better, commentors are missing."
Be the better commenter. Or "better, commentor" if that's your thing.
…he speaks of the pompatus of smaller, better government.
Miller is undeniably correct as a matter of constitutional law and public policy. A few years back constitutional law Prof. Phillip Hamburger wrote a book titled "Is Administrative Law Unlawful?" That's part of the academic foundation for this.
No doubt that an unaccountable and unelected bureaucracy is the biggest threat to our democracy.
I say it again, nobody likes change. Whether it is having to work with a leader you disagree or software changes that make you do something different than last time. Good people learn to deal with change and cope with it easily without complaints. They don't have to like it, but they can accommodate it and move on. Bad people will complain and demand we go back, which will never happen. The result is the bad people will get left behind to stew in their unhappiness, alone.
It puts me in mind of my final days working at Big Tech. Our group was reorganized and the new leadership had a very different idea how things should be done. A lot of us didn't like it. Our choices were to go with the new program, quit, or be fired. Very few were fired, but a lot of us quit. I didn't see it as a problem - it wasn't my company, and I didn't have to work there. There is no reason government employees should face a different set of choices. Malicious compliance should immediately put them in the Fired category. "Security will accompany you as you remove any personal effects."
Xlnt except for the disrupting fourth syllable in normalcy.
Reagan's people learned that you have to give the press a story every day or they would invent the stories they wanted to tell. Now, Trump's people have learned that you have fact check the media on the spot or in advance before they "fact check" you to death with "facts" that the "fact checkers" make up.
I'm now very skeptical about 1) criticism of politicians on the basis of their style or vocabulary and 2) accounts of people who just happen to overhear presidents saying this or that behind closed doors. A precise vocabulary isn't any guarantee of a successful presidency, and a lot of those anecdotes are just made up.
Another thing to be skeptical about is the idea of "the adults" taking charge again and the country returning to "normal" or "normalcy" or "normality." Is it anything more than just a way of celebrating one's own side's victory? What is "normal"? Can you get back to it by behaving "normally" or do you have to "upend" things? Can you get back to it at all?
The "adults" were hardheaded men who came into government to achieve goals that everyone agreed with -- settling the country, building industry, beating the Germans and the Japanese, competing with the USSR. The "adults" went away a long time ago and aren't coming back.
Or maybe Team Trump is trying to do what the "adults" did in past years, but Washington DC and the mediasphere have become such a circus that nothing looks really grown up anymore.
I agree with Trump and Miller about getting rid of DEI. Have they actually gotten rid of anything doing DEI? I've seen them fire park rangers, NSF scientists, nuclear technicians, a bunch of veterans now working at the VA.
The BS is getting so tiresome. I hated when the democrats did it, and now the republicans are doing it. I was excited when Trump won and thought we'd get a sensible reprise of his first term. What a mess this is.
after his first month in office it's clear he has a plan and is prepared for all possible contingencies.
I think he and his folks have been working on this continuously since 2020. The repurposing of USDS into DOGE was a stroke of genius, as was the opening gambit to yoink the Democrats' USAID slush fund. Turning off the spigot of taxpayer dollars to the left-wing NGO shadow government was a more crippling surprise attack than the Pearl Harbor raid.
The flurry of pre-written executive orders since then, which carefully cater to recent USSC tendencies to limit bureaucrats' powers to deviate from Presidential command and the text of the authorizing legislation, must have been in the works for months or years.
It's all a sheer delight to see it unfold. Revenge is so very, very sweet. Kash Patel taking the reins of the FBI yesterday was the cherry on top.
This is not victory yet, though. As Churchill said, it's not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. If the momentum can be maintained, our conquest of this monster Deep State enemy occupation government will be total, and the Democrat Party will suffer apocalyptically damaging exposure of its misdeeds, financial and otherwise. But we have much work yet to do to ensure that Trump is successful.
I agree with VDH. The Biden-stealth-Obama presidency was the revolution. The Trump presidency is the restoration-with-comedic-and-schadenfreudelicious fireworks. Any future documentary needs a soundtrack that features the "Ride of the Valkyries" at max volume so you can barely even hear the narrator.
Nothing like the smell of napalm at every single Executive Order signing.
"...If the momentum can be maintained, our conquest of this monster Deep State enemy occupation government will be total..."
Not likely. Rent seekers abound. They inhabit all parties.
I'm worried less about the will of the people than rule of law, in line with the Constitution.
"The threat to democracy — indeed, the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants..."
"... who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI — racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change."
What evidence is there supporting these scary stories?
The X guy gets the history wrong - the President was chosen by electors chosen by state legislatures. That was to avoid the will of the people in favor of somebody presumably more intelligent on the average. The people choose legislatures.
Robert Cook: the evidence for unchecked power of the bureaucrats is codified in the CFRs and in all the state regulations that take laws and cherry pick them until the original purpose is lost and is replaced by a highly prescriptive step by step process that requires lots of time and money to comply with. Even then, the bureaucratic interpretations of the federal and state regulations takes priority in making decisions.
I got to see this up close and personal for almost 40 years and the field of environmental compliance and clean up. In my experience 80% of the money spent in that field is wasted in useless expenditures designed to satisfy the whim of who is ever overseeing your project. Trump, as a developer, runs into the same problem. However he is willing to take them on and spend the money to beat them to death with legal teams to obtain permits and permissions.
The way the administrative state is set up is that it makes it very difficult to impossible for Mom and Pop operations to exist in those spaces which are then taken over and dominated by huge international corporations who can easily absorb the extra costs since they're creative smaller competitors are eliminated.
That's just my experience.
“I myself am hungry for normality…
Look for the compound ions. Based on FDA Regs, I would expect them to be included on the nutrition label.
Well put, Hassayamper. As you approach Washington DC by AMTRAK from the south or the north, decaying buildings held together by kudzu, or small abandoned industrial plots give way to the wealthiest suburbs, then exurbs, then upscale urban neighborhoods and stately buildings, all the way to Union Station. The transition from poverty and neglect is especially jarring from the southern route, and the hive of bureaucratically accumulated wealth is especially sprawling from the north. Hidden from view are the rows of embassies and mansions where retired and revolving politicians live concealed from the taxpayers and lobby each other in ornate hotels and restaurants. Besides a few Disney-like distractions for the unwashed tourists -- the Smithsonians, the Lincoln statue, the Mall -- millions of millionaire bureaucrats live fat and happy on our tax dollars while telling themselves and telling each other that they are making great personal and financial sacrifices to be public servants. Congress, the Supreme Court, and even the White House seem like after thoughts.
And now there is Trump, threatening the hubris of these preening suburban millionaire bureaucrats, and especially those in the mansions dining on Embassy Row, even threatening many of his own seemingly-natural allies in their own think tanks and mansions.
He isn't threatening to downsize them: he is threatening to make their entire ecosystem appear, then disappear. Most will keep their gorgeous upscale suburban lifestyles, but their bubble is definitely burst, and what they have taken from the rest of Americans will be taken from their children. Their children will not automatically inherit the family fiefdom of lording it over the serfs.
Every generation of these people have done less for American and more for themselves and their increasingly unproductive offspring. Expect them to react like rabid dogs if this ugly truth can really sink in.
"What evidence is there supporting these scary stories?"
Robert, the NYTimes, WaPo, etal report these stories every single day, only they report them casting the bureaucrats as the good guys who are only protecting the country from the actions of the President who was just elected by those same people.
Marx offers the correct academic approach to Trump today, transgender women especially. What to do about the Trump counterrevolution.
Trump, like Napoleon, knows how to get our attention every day...
A grotesque mediocrity rises to power, how is this possible? Marx and Engels have the answer.
Marx link disappeared.
Grammatical errors inserted after typing, courtesy of this cheap and maddening Amazon pad. What I typed was this: "Every generation of these people has done less for America and more for themselves..."
Hassayamper said:" Turning off the spigot of taxpayer dollars to the left-wing NGO shadow government was a more crippling surprise attack than the Pearl Harbor raid." That has been my reaction, and I wish I had said it as well. I was as surprised as most Americans were after December 7th 1941. I had some suspicions but had no idea that the US government was funding so many organizations that were actively subverting the country. With luck, these details will exile the democrats to the wilderness for decades, but based on my facebook feeds, they are making very little impact on the loyalists.
Cookie, the Justice Department has put more energy into dismantling equality before the law than enforcing it, both through fiat and disparate enforcement, for sixty years now. I'm sure the same is true of the rest of the bureaucratic mirages.
One of the hallmark characteristics of an ism is how much it bothers the heck of a sufferer to see others behave in the same way.
where retired and revolving politicians live concealed from the taxpayers and lobby each other in ornate hotels and restaurants
We end up on email lists for some famous foodie chefs in various cities. When their empires start expanding from their first kitchen it’s amazing the number of them that open store three or four in the DC area. Not surprising, just amazing…
I like listening to Stephen Miller, whether it's taking CNN airheads to the woodshed (figuratively) or doing these Press Briefings. I feel the same contempt for these "reporters" that he displays for all the same reasons. I liked when he called them out yesterday for not "reporting on Joe Biden's condition" or who was really running the government from 2021 to 2025.
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/02/21/democrats-refund-trump-lays-off-irs-employees-n2408699
It also seems you need to use the MicroSoft browser.
Nope, I despise Edge and sign in just fine with Chrome or Firefox.
Compounding the sins of the bureaucratic theft of of taxpayer money for their own ends is the theft of our time to try to get resolution on many number of things, simply because the bureaucrats need to hide their crimes. Issues that should take days or weeks to resolve instead take months or years. They prefer the technology be ancient, slow and overwhelmed and the processes for resolution involve multiple people at multiple agencies. We can’t know about JFK, Epstein, Benghazi, J6, etc. because too much sunlight is too bad for them. It’s downright oppressive.
What evidence is there supporting these scary stories?
LOL definitely not falling for Robert's rhetorical bullshit again. We've pointed the way. Be a Big Boy now and do your own research. The reason you DON'T KNOW is that you don't really CARE to know.
In 2008, candidate Obama repeatedly talked about "fundamentally transforming America", yet it seems no one asked him some basic questions, such as "Transform America in what ways?" Even the night of the election, several news pundits were talking about how they didn't know who Obama really was or what he stood for. Whose fault is that? Why didn't someone try to learn what Obama was alluding to? The answer seems obvious - they wanted him to win so they weren't going to do anything that might harm his election chances.
We've seen what they did in those 12 years. Now President Trump is working to reverse as much of the damage as possible.
The problem with an amorphous state within a state is that it is leaderless, and it can work, as long as the conditions in which it evolved continue to obtain, but if the world changes? It's like those people who got frontal lobotomies. They could still deal with the world as long as the world did not change, but inevitably things change, and these people became more and more maladapted. Look at China, and how it worked great until the Brits showed up, with their empire, their ships, and their opium. China was reduced to an impoverished state for centuries. China was ruled by the Mandarins, who are considered the prototype of deep state administrators.
Well the world is changing. You can't keep spending more every year, and keep growing your military, and doing regime change, and starting wars, because eventually, like the yeast organism in a broth of sugar, you are going to run out of sugar molecules and poison yourself in your own waste.
Who’s gonna win? Trump or the bureaucracy?
The game at FBI and CIA is just getting underway, but this one is easy. Trump had four years to apply the lessons of 2017-2021 and the lawfare that followed to prepare and they are using all kinds of organizational jujitsu. Sure the stories are anecdotal but illustrative. Like the guy laid off by Biden's EPA for questioning the DEI training. Zeldin ended up firing the head of the department and brought the laid-off worker back and made him supervisor. This is very much like the stories I've read about USAID and Treasury where Trump has lopped off many of the top management, then used the employees the DOGE team identifies as "good guys" to find who the other good guys are and identify the employees who shirk their work or mistreat lower level workers. When they give a previously mistreated employee a bump in pay and rank they create an ally. And having a DOGE team member in HR and IT in every department has been an excellent way to verify claims by these "good guy" assistants they have in cleaning house.
What evidence is there supporting these scary stories?
I understand the desire to tell Cook to learn to research. It is for his own good. However, this was low hanging fruit to me.
So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change.
Vanity Fair: "Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to dismantle multiple federal agencies, and no one seems capable of pushing back. Enter a nascent FBI rebellion."
First one is free Cook. It gets very expensive from here on.
You are not winning arguments by professing your own ignorance. Now you have been educated and lost the argument of ignorance too.
MJB Wolf: I so agree with you regarding Stephen Miller. Trump is getting much better advice this time, though I still think a few of his first-time appointees were treated with too much contempt and impatience. It speaks volumes that he even ran again, but Kemp, Sessions and a few others were more his allies than many saw. Anyway, I don't know Stephen Miller, but I know Stephen Miller types. They're the ones who do the work; don't really want recognition, and they really understand what they believe in. They don't want a spotlight, and it's a bigger sacrifice to step into one than most people know. There are a lot of Stephen Miller in politics. I'm glad Trump is empowering them. Let Trump and his giant flaming balls appoint them, then stand back as they get the job done, because, quietly, they were always there ready to get the job done.
Steven, I'm not sure where you are hearing these horror stories of parks or whatever coming to a screeching halt because of the minimal layoffs. The media likes to lie. One of their favorite lies is amplifying Shutdown Theatre, which was a tactic of inflicting pain on the public that Obama perfected during his terms. Is there really only one guy in Yosemite that can unlock bathrooms? If so, do you really think that is Trump's fault? And how big a deal are these stupid little stories being spun, compared to wrestling control of government back from the "permanent bureaucracy" that held the belief they answer to no one?
I'll leave the last word on this to Mary Kathrine Ham:
Every revelation is basically, “we do things in incredibly effed up ways and this has revealed the incredible effed uppedness of our ways that no private entity could ever withstand, but we can with your money, and the real problem is you have noticed our sacred effed up ways.”
No one’s like “Gee, maybe it’s a problem that a significant number of tourists get stuck bare-assed in our spartan, drafty shitters and have to wait for Todd the ancient locksmith of Yosemite to traverse El Capitan with the one piton that doubles as a skeleton key.”
Maybe THAT’S the problem that should be addressed.
OK, the penultimate word, because the last word I have is: AGREE!
From the New York Post:
Target sued by Florida for defrauding shareholders about DEI
Target was sued on Thursday by the state of Florida for allegedly concealing the risks of diversity and social initiatives that led to a customer backlash and wiped billions of dollars from the retailer’s market value."
“Corporations that push radical leftist ideology at the expense of financial returns jeopardize the retirement security of Florida’s first responders and teachers,” James Uthmeier, the state’s Republican attorney general, said in a statement.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/business/target-sued-by-florida-for-defrauding-shareholders-about-dei-2/
Note that the *Republican* attorney general in *Florida* is commenting with concern about adverse effects on "first responders and teachers" (otherwise known as government workers), and not about the impact on small business owners, waitresses or plumbers in the private sector.
If you want to know why so many people seem so unconcerned about laying off government workers, Mr. Attorney General's choice of whose concern to comment on might be a clue.
I've heard VDH pronounce several words strangely, but I can't remember what they were. Is it Fresno or too much Greek and Latin?
Mason, I assume the State of Florida is suing on behalf of her employees, not her citizens.
That's kind of the point. "You can fuck around with private sector workers but if you do anything to harm public employees, well... that's not going to fly."
I was excited when Trump won and thought we'd get a sensible reprise of his first term. What a mess this is.
Why don't I believe you?
I’m surprised there haven’t been hundreds of DEI lawsuits drummed up by attorneys. In market downturns the office gets stacks of those class action postcards simply because the stock price dropped. With DEI there’s some validity to the actions…
"Ralph L said...
I've heard VDH pronounce several words strangely, but I can't remember what they were. Is it Fresno or too much Greek and Latin?"
People who learn a great deal by reading often know words by sight that they have never learned how to pronounce correctly.
Mike - Your reply is the kind of nonsense that I mean. You seem to be saying it was good to fire the park ranger and that the media is blowing it out of proportion because obviously someone else can unlock the bathrooms (actually, I had seen an article about a different Park ranger, but this one serves as well). But my point is - why fire the locksmith at all? He was not doing DEI was he? This was just an ordinary person doing an ordinary respectable job.
Now the conspiracy theorists are saying that they're picking people to fire who appear sympathetic. No, that's also BS. The problem is that the Trump administration is firing people for no good reason. Maybe people are noticing that this is grossly unfair to those people. "Life's not fair, people get laid off all the time" - that's true, but normally there aren't a bunch of loons on the internet trying to convince everyone that you actually deserved to get laid off.
They're not whittling down the administrative state by firing people! The laws didn't change. We're just making our ability to navigate those laws more inefficient by removing the bureaucracy that was set up to facilitate those laws.
“I've heard VDH pronounce several words strangely, but I can't remember what they were. Is it Fresno or too much Greek and Latin?”
Ralph, from North Carolina, writes of VDH “pronouncing several words strangely”?
Oh, the irony! 😉
Howard said:
"Robert Cook: the evidence for unchecked power of the bureaucrats is codified in the CFRs and in all the state regulations that take laws and cherry pick them until the original purpose is lost and is replaced by a highly prescriptive step by step process that requires lots of time and money to comply with. Even then, the bureaucratic interpretations of the federal and state regulations takes priority in making decisions."
That may be. Blame the directors and policy-makers within each departments. The ordinary working stiffs who come into their bureau offices to do their day's work are not making these decisions. They're just doing what they're tasked to do, as is true of most working people in every working environment. They cannot be characterized/blamed as "...unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants...who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for."
Ralph, from North Carolina, writes of VDH “pronouncing several words strangely”?
Navy Junior. I lived in (mostly) NoVa, Norfolk, Rhode Island, SoCal, and SoCar before I moved "back" to NC at 31, where most of my ancestors lived since the Revolution. The others were in southern Virginia.
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