The latest brouhaha fostered by the ravening left and the mainstream media seems, at first glance, to be justified.
Seriously, using a group chat to discuss attack plans does not a good national security posture make. It was a lapse of pretty high water, even though that the full investigation into the whys and wherefores has yet to be completed.
Never let a good scandal go to waste, though, so let’s call for the heads of everyone on that list, since it was the most egregious failure of security ever in the history of ever.
But.
While there have been accusations that the current administration has a cavalier attitude toward the fiasco, I would submit that this particular malady has been prevalent in Washington, D.C., for quite some time, and has not been limited to the Republican Party.
While the issue needs investigation and consequences, this isn’t the first or even the worst breach of security in this nation’s history, going back to Benedict Arnold, who offered the British West Point in return for big bucks and a military commission.
Also worth mentioning here is the Rosenbergs, who famously passed along nuclear secrets to the Russians at a small diner in Vaughn, N.M., giving the Soviets nuclear weapons.
We can move that closer to our time, as well: How about the thousands of State Department emails, proven hacked by the Chinese government, that were stored, and subsequently erased, from a server hidden in Hillary Clinton’s home?
How about Rep. Eric Swalwell’s relationship with a purported Chinese spy? Sure, a House committee found no “evidence” of wrongdoing, but the optics of a sitting member of the House Intelligence Committee hanging with his honey trap is pretty darn bad.
Much like the “Bloom County” strip portraying the press as barking after any and every supposed “-gate” that is created from a mess-up by the government — mostly conservative governments, mind you — the current crop of newscasters is painting this as an Armageddon-level crisis. To my mind, though, that is both disingenuous and short-sighted, since it fails to encompass the entire problem.
In our country, we have an all-volunteer military, led by civilians, that was set up to keep the country safe from outside and inside threats. When civilians, who are not as deeply trained as military members in security protocol, get involved, there will be issues.
So instead of looking to completely replace any and everyone who had their names attached to the chat, how about fixing the laissez faire attitudes that exist in a ruling class that believes in its moral superiority? A class that fails to represent but believes it is justified in doing anything as long as it’s couched in terms like “good for the country?”
How about handing out consequences — civil, legal and social — to anyone that violates security? How about returning the media to a time when it had its own sense of decency and ethics? Sure, as a media person myself, that’s a tough line to toe, but just as the members of the chat should have paid attention to who was on the chat, the writer should have, and eventually did, bail on it. The later printing of the entire chat, while done for the “public good,” was to my mind entirely self-serving. Not illegal, but definitely not the best use of sources.
It’s an entire climate of meh attitudes that has led to a lackadaisical approach to government. I’m thinking that instead of the country sitting around getting cranky, let’s make it easier for the people to hand out consequences to officials who screw up, like recalls and such, to let our “leaders” know that it’s time to take things seriously.
Tony Farkas is editor of the San Jacinto News-Times and the Trinity County News-Standard. He writes editorials and his views don’t necessarily reflect those of this newspaper. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
