Lisa Rein and Juliet Eilperin – The Washington Post:
The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.
At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.
…
Most members of President Trump’s Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged — above all — with monitoring the secretaries’ loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the administration.
Of course it would be the party of those fondest of bitching about political correctness that would install political purity minders among cabinet offices. Given more to hypocrisy lately – health care coverage that isn’t; travel bans targeting religion rather than security; stepped-up deportation and the Great Wall of Trump costing money cut from needed social programs, yet protecting no-one – than legislation and governance, the GOP, and the Trump administration in particular are a modern American version of good ol’ Soviet era communism: the state owns you, and ownership begins at the top. Allowed to continue, it will spread downward through the various executive agencies until a shadow government monitoring our existing government pulls the strings, rather than the people’s elected representatives.
This is a disgusting disgrace to our constitutional process of self-governance.
Why do these people so hate America that they are systematically turning it into the menace we resisted for much of the twentieth century?
And why did so many decent Americans vote for them?
#political #correct #soviet #era #purity #unamerican #minders #GOP #hypocrisy
A Random Stroll 