We have truly entered the age of Derp Government, in which the colossus in Washington has grown institutionally fat, drunk, and stupid on trillions of dollars in madcap spending. The bigger government gets, and the more power it claims, the more unaccountable it becomes, and the less anyone gives a damn about their jobs.
Exhibit A, of course, is HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
and the historic disaster of the ObamaCare rollout, whose aftermath has given
us so many wonderful congressional hearings filled with mighty six-figure
bureaucrats claiming that nobody had any idea what was going on, during the
three and a half years they were blowing a billion dollars on web
infrastructure, training, and marketing. There was no oversight… so the
overseers cannot be held responsible for the ensuing disaster. There was
no management… so the managers must be allowed to keep their jobs, every single
one of them. It really is like watching a gang of
drunken frat boys claim nobody was at the wheel when their party van slammed
into a tree.
ObamaCare is the paramount example of Derp Government,
but it’s far from the only one. Last week, we had the spectacle of the
Obama Administration’s top Afghanistan specialists rolling into
a congressional hearing without the foggiest notion of how many
casualties there have been this year, or how much the war effort cost. Hey,
man, nobody told us there was going to be a test, or we would
have done some homework instead of partying all night.
No better prepared was the hapless clown currently
serving as Secretary of State, onetime Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry, who apparently
didn’t know that North Korea already has nuclear
weapons when he moaned, “To have a nuclear weapon, potentially, in the hands of
somebody like Kim Jong In… Jun… just becomes even more unacceptable.”
That’s Kim Jong Un, Mr. Secretary. And he does
indeed have nuclear weapons in his pudgy hands, as did his father. But in
the crazy who-gives-a-damn degeneracy of the Obama Administration, where
trillion-dollar industry takeovers are made up on the fly, no one expects the
Secretary of State to have the geopolitical knowledge of the average college
freshman. He says he’s real smart, and that’s good enough for the
media.
Then there’s the bizarre spectacle of Fake Sign Language
Guy, a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of crime and violent behavior,
coupled with a blissful lack of knowledge about sign language, who somehow
managed to get on stage with the President of the United States at the Mandela
memorial in South Africa. It turns out that Fake Sign Language Guy,
Thamsanqa Jantjie, participated in a mob action that killed two men by
“necklacing” them with tires full of burning gasoline.
“Questions have been raised over the screening of the man
who has been the subject of complaints from the deaf community before, and who
said he had hallucinations and saw angels while interpreting at the stadium in
Soweto,” writes the UK Independent.
Why, yes, I think there are a few questions to be asked about that,
especially since the President is pleased to bill taxpayers for a titanic
entourage of security personnel and aides, every time he travels. But
nobody in this vast royal procession bothered to apply even the most elementary
scrutiny to the interpreter that would wind up standing next to the President?
It’s not the first time the vaunted Secret Service has been caught
metaphorically flat on its back during the Obama years, either. Wait,
make that literally flat on its
back.
The combination of unlimited money, total power, and
absolutely zero accountability is intoxicating. It’s hardly a
new feature of this Administration – it’s been building for decades in the
depths of imperial agencies, completely insulated from both fiscal reality and
the voting public. No degree of failure means extinction for any
big government program. The good times will never stop rolling.
Careless disregard for taxpayer money has given us infuriating carnivals
of excess, from the lavish
conference parties of the General Services Administration, to the goofy
training videos of the Internal Revenue Service. A common
thread running through these scandals is how silly they are.
Nobody with a shred of common sense or responsibility would approve them.
But Uncle Sam is living like the Great Gatsby these days, and few of his
bureaucratic nephews see themselves as the careful stewards of scarce and
sacred taxpayer dollars.
Which brings us to the Environmental Protection Agency’s
latest scandal, and this one’s a doozy. NBC News tells
the tale of John C. Beale, a “climate change” expert who cheated the government
out of a few million dollars in outrageously lavish salary and benefits over
the course of a decade… by never showing up for work… because he claimed he was
working as a CIA spy in Pakistan.
John C. Beale, who pled guilty in
September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and
other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C.,
federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said
that his lies were a “crime of massive proportion” that were “offensive” to
those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.
Beale’s lawyer, while acknowledging his
guilt, has asked for leniency and offered a psychological explanation for the
climate expert’s bizarre tales.
“With the help of his therapist,” wrote
attorney John Kern, “Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of
greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and
dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.” Kern
also said Beale was driven “to manipulate those around him through the
fabrication of grandiose narratives … that are fueled by his insecurities.”
Well, that actually sounds plausible, given that “climate
change” is the biggest, most delusional fraud ever perpetrated. A lot of
the people who marinate in that atmosphere of self-righteous quackery lose touch
with reality.
It’s long past time for the Church of
Global Warming to start paying for its own clergy, because they’re not cheap
dates:
Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his
case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted
fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two
new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials
at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover
stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of
dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses — including
first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up
thousands in bills for limos and taxis.
Until he retired in April after
learning he was under federal investigation, Beale, an NYU grad with a masters
from Princeton, was earning a salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, making him
the highest paid official at the EPA. He earned more money than Gina McCarthy,
the agency’s administrator and, for years, his immediate boss, according to
agency documents.
In September, Beale, who served as
a “senior policy adviser” in the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, pled
guilty to defrauding the U.S. government out of nearly $900,000 since 2000.
Beale perpetrated his fraud largely by failing to show up at the EPA for months
at a time, including one 18-month stretch starting in June 2011 when he
did “absolutely no work,” as Kern, Beale’s lawyer, acknowledged in his court
filing.
And who would miss him? Dogs don’t notice when
their ticks take the day off. At this point, the machinery of the
“climate change” fraud runs itself. Billions of dollars are flogged out
of the private sector with automated whips. Sign a couple of reports,
write a few op-eds inveighing against “deniers,” announce that every hurricane
and typhoon is the wrath of the Angry Sky Gods, declare that cold winters are
proof of global warming, declare that hot winters are proof of global warming,
work with radical greens to target the next bit of the Industrial Revolution
you can bully the populace into renouncing… most of it can be done by
underlings, and one imagines the highest-paid official at the EPA has a lot of
those.
Quite a bit of Derp Government is running on autopilot.
It’s filled with redundant and obsolete agencies, whose primary objective
is demonstrating they are too under-funded to accomplish anything. The
most outrageous, and yet comically awesome, example is a scam artist who gets
away with bilking the government out of a $200k salary, limo service,
first-class air fare, and five-star hotels for a decade while
telling anyone who asks what he actually does that he’s too
busy to answer, because he, Jack Ryan, James Bond, and Jason Bourne are getting
ready to take out a terror cell in Pakistan. At least Beale had a sense
of humor about it:
To explain his long absences, Beale
told agency officials — including McCarthy — that he was engaged in
intelligence work for the CIA, either at agency headquarters or in
Pakistan. At one point he claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the
Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to Sullivan.
“Due to recent events that you have
probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” he wrote McCarthy in a Dec. 18, 2010
email. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas ….Ho, ho,
ho.”
But he didn’t work for the CIA, ever, and didn’t even
have a security clearance. He spent the decade living large at his
Northern Virginia house and Cape Cod vacation home, when he wasn’t jet-setting
at taxpayer expense. He was constantly zipping off to conferences and
violating the official per diem expense limit by 100 percent, and his expense
vouchers were routinely approved by his colleagues. For ten damn
years.
Nor was that Beale’s only deception,
according to court documents. In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for
six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency
election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the
government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for
personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. (His parents lived there.) He also
claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam.
According to his lawyer’s filing, he didn’t have malaria and never served in
Vietnam. He told the story to EPA officials so he could get special handicap
parking at a garage near EPA headquarters.
I wonder if he got a magic hat while he was non-serving
in Vietnam. No doubt the experience is seared into his memory. And
he used that story to scam a handicapped parking space!
How did Derp Government finally catch this legendary
grifter? Well, he had a big, splashy retirement aboard a yacht, attended
by top EPA officials… and then he kept collecting paychecks. For another year and a half.
And then someone at the EPA finally decided something
was amiss.
This blood-boiling outrage is casually written off by EPA
Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan as a product of agency culture.
He doesn’t seem to realize he’s describing a culture of mind-blowing,
reform-proof arrogance and irresponsibility:
Sullivan said he doubted Beale’s fraud
could occur at any federal agency other than the EPA. “There’s a certain
culture here at the EPA where the mission is the most important thing,” he
said. “They don’t think like criminal investigators. They tend to be very
trusting and accepting.”
In a statement to NBC News, Alisha
Johnson, McCarthy’s press secretary, said that Beale’s fraud was “uncovered” by
McCarthy while she was head of the Office of Air and Radiation. “[Beale] is a convicted felon who went to
great lengths to deceive and defraud the U.S. government over the span of more
than a decade,” said Johnson. “EPA has worked in coordination with its
inspector general and the U.S. Attorney’s office. The Agency has [put] in place
additional safeguards to help protect against fraud and abuse related to
employee time and attendance, including strengthening supervisory controls of
time and attendance, improved review of employee travel and a tightened
retention incentive processes.”
But he didn’t go to “great lengths.”
This was easy. He gamed a system that was
institutionally incapable of seeing through the flimsiest story ever concocted,
a story that could have been shredded with a couple of phone calls. And
he did it from the very pinnacle of privilege and power, not the dark and
faceless recesses of a cubicle farm. Our titanic super-government,
staffed with the best and brightest, claims it can run every industry in
America better than its owners… but nobody noticed that the highest-paid
“expert” at one of the most powerful Washington agencies spent ten years
goofing off at home. There’s really nothing all that surprising about the
failure of ObamaCare, is there? This entire system has passed the point
of caring what happens after it wins the latest political victory and expands
further. It thinks always about its frontiers, never about the careless
rot at its core.
Source: Human Events, 12/17/13 by John Hayward, http://www.humanevents.com/2013/12/17/derp-government-
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