This is the last Jim-written Jolt for a week. Everyone who's heading south on Interstate 95 today, please stay out of the left-hand lane. America's Ongoing Era of 'Ineptocracy' Picture the day, not too long from now -- say, mid-2016 -- when hackers target the Social Security Administration. They do more than the recent hack that compromised the Social Security numbers of every federal employee and quite a few retired federal employees. This time, they mess around with the system sufficiently to disrupt Social Security checks being sent out to elderly Americans. Maybe not all Americans, maybe just a fraction -- of course, a "small fraction" of the 59 million collecting Social Security is a lot of people. One month, for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, the checks don't go out the door, or they go to the wrong address, or the wrong amount is sent. Is that when the consequences of widespread government dependence and inept, no-accountability federal bureaucracy will be clear to everyone? We've already seen it all over the federal government -- the VA, ATF, Health and Human Services, U.S. Secret Service, the NSA, the IRS, the U.S. Postal Service, NOAA, DHS, and now the Office of Personnel Management . . . Allahpundit: That's not even half his list. Why is it, Geraghty concludes, that with a record of failure — unpunished failure, to be clear — as long as this, progressives still want the feds to have an ever greater role in American life? Let me supplement that with another question: Why is it that Obama and his inner circle seem to value loyalty, in declining to punish their hires for gross incompetence, more than they do accountability? Why shouldn't O call a presser and stand there for 45 minutes shaking his fist that underlings ever could have allowed this to happen? John Schindler says the OPM hack amounts to nothing less than the wrecking of American espionage, a disaster arguably even bigger than Edward Snowden stealing the keys to the castle from the NSA. A rival power now has everything they need to sniff out, blackmail, frame, or spear-phish practically anyone who's worked for Uncle Sam over the last 30 years. "This isn't shame on China," said former CIA chief Michael Hayden. "This is shame on us." Right, but that's usually the case; most major government debacles were preventable. Then someone fails to prevent them and . . . nothing happens. Why is that? Part of the answer, I think, is that the age of ubiquitous media requires the White House and its deputies to be careful about alienating employees. Who knows what other scandals are known to higher-ups at OPM, or what sort of security breaches they could orchestrate if they got fired and felt disgruntled? Make enemies of them and there's no shortage of reporters in print media, TV media, or online who'll be happy to listen to them spill whatever they have. Unaccountability, in other words, is the price of damage control. And it's also the price of competitive government hiring: If you can't afford to pay a qualified applicant as much as a private-sector firm could, one way to make up for the shortfall in compensation is with job security. You can target tea-party nonprofits for special tax scrutiny, leave veterans to languish on eternal waiting lists at the VA, or get caught sleeping while China's rifling through the federal filing cabinets, but only very rarely, when perceptions of inaction become too politically painful, will the White House move to punish employees for it. We're all used to that. What Dougherty's asking is why perceptions of inaction at OPM aren't already so painful that Obama has no choice but to pull the trapdoor on someone. Ultimately it's a critique of the public even more so than our government. Why aren't more people demanding that heads roll at OPM? An NR commenter calls our current system of government an "ineptocracy." When we say it's time for heads to roll . . . is bringing back the guillotine too harsh? Okay, even if we never actually beheaded any federal employee for negligence or incompetence, could we at least bring it out and leave it in the middle of Washington, D.C. to motivate everyone there? Because we need to do something dramatic: The agency that allowed hackers linked to China to steal private information about nearly every federal employee — and detailed personal histories of millions with security clearances — failed for years to take basic steps to secure its computer networks, officials acknowledged to Congress on Tuesday. Democrats and Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee spoke in unison to describe their outrage over what they called gross negligence by the Office of Personnel Management. The agency's data was breached last year in two massive cyberattacks only recently revealed. The criticism came from within, as well. Michael Esser, the agency's assistant inspector general for audit, detailed a yearslong failure by OPM to adhere to reasonable cybersecurity practices, and he said that that for a long time, the people running the agency's information technology had no expertise. Last year, he said, an inspector general's audit recommended that the agency shut down some of its networks because they were so vulnerable. The director, Katherine Archuleta, declined, saying it would interfere with the agency's mission. Archuleta, stumbling occasionally under withering questions from lawmakers, sought to defend her tenure and portray the agency's problems as decades in the making as its equipment aged. She appeared to cast blame on her recent predecessors, one of whom, John Berry, is the U.S. ambassador to Australia. Offered chances to apologize and resign, she declined to do either. Is Jeb in the Race So Republicans Can Finally Reevaluate the Bush Years? What do Republicans think of the George W. Bush presidency today? Good man, flawed policies? Mixed bag? Noble soul, poor logistics? That guy who writes that other newsletter makes a good point: I think Jeb Bush's presence in the 2016 field serves an enormously useful purpose for the Republican Party, and may be essential for it to win in 2016 and beyond. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, Republicans never really adjudicated the outcomes of the George W. Bush years. The absence of a reconsideration of lessons learned from the financial crisis, the Iraq War, Bush era security policies, No Child Left Behind and the compassionate conservative domestic agenda took place behind the scenes, not on the campaign trail. This is in part because there was no Bush proxy in either field. Dick Cheney didn't run, nor Donald Rumsfeld, nor even anyone directly associated with compassionate conservatism. None of Bush's Texas crew, insofar as he really had one, ran in either year. . . . A vote for Mitt Romney or John McCain or Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee or anyone else couldn't be seen or felt -- by fans or detractors -- as a vote for W. This time, it's different. This time the party has a candidate who does represent a proxy for those eight years, and at a safe enough remove from the worst of 2008 that the process of reconsidering those years can now be a much kinder and gentler process for Republican primary voters. I think some "real talk" among Republicans in the coming months about what George W. Bush got right and got wrong would be extremely useful for the party and for the country. For example, Bush's proclamation, "When it comes to the desire for liberty and justice, there is no clash of civilizations . . . This much we know with certainty: The desire for freedom resides in every human heart" . . . yeah, that wasn't true in 2004 and it looks painfully naïve right now. All the various factions fighting from Libya to Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Pakistan don't really seem to be driven by a desire for freedom. There are civilizations that adamantly oppose liberty and justice -- at least as we define them -- and they've been getting increasingly aggressive. But I'm not quite so sure Jeb Bush is the ideal proxy for debating his brother. It will be fascinating to see where Jeb is willing to say he disagreed with George -- if anywhere. The former Florida Governor concluding a particular decision was wrong may constitute about as close to an official GOP renunciation of a past decision as any. Of course, Republicans will be having this debate as the public continues to reconsider the Bush presidency: According to the poll, 52 % of adults had a favorable impression of George W. Bush, 43% unfavorable. When Bush left office in 2009, only about a third of Americans said they had a positive opinion of him. Iraq didn't look quite so bad when Bush left; it's a worse mess now than in January 2009. ADDENDA: Last night's appearance on Greta was bumped for other news. Next appearance TBD. Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. This week's pop-culture podcast, which will be posted Thursday or Friday, covers how our hair (or lack thereof) influences how people view us; True Detective, seasons one and two; how Internet "cookies" ensure our past purchases will haunt us throughout our web browsing and my ominous feeling about Pixar's Inside Out. | 
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