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You’re Fired!
A few weeks ago, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal noted that in spite of multiple examples of incompetence and non-performance in the Biden Administration, Joe Biden hasn’t fired anyone. Since it’s been reported that he has 560 people in the Executive Office, he certainly has plenty of people to choose from. So I have to wonder, after almost two years, is there no one he’d like to replace with somebody more knowledgeable and competent in any position?
Having the same staff in place after all this time is a mystery to me. Does Biden think his people are more talented than the rest of us who see how disastrous their performance is? Is there a secret prohibition against letting people go? Does he think firing someone will make him “look bad?” (Is there a way he could look any worse than he does?) Or did he demand that everyone needed to take a loyalty oath when they were hired that would guarantee them lifetime federal government employment?
I still miss him. Charles Krauthammer was able to observe the political landscape with savvy and insight, and often nailed the Washington scene accordingly. But when I read this quotation, I wondered if Charles would make the same observation, given the events of the last five to ten years.
would anyone expect a show of humility from any president, past or present? The reason is that the current devastation is costing our country, the Afghan people, and the rest of the world dearly, because decisions were made out of gross incompetence and the very attributes I am citing.
When I was a budding novelist, I quickly learned that the publishing world didn’t care about my aspirational goals. I had to conform to the publisher, not vice versa. As many positive thoughts as I lavished on my first novel, it never saw print because it wasn’t very good. Eventually I learned, over the 20-year process of writing three more unpublished novels, how to write fiction. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t believed in raw talent worth developing. Positive thinking, while it bridged no gaps, at least provided a launching platform. But between the dream and the realization was a long (like, 20-year) stretch of hard work.
