United States of Insanity

Created
Tue, 03/01/2023 - 01:00
Updated
Tue, 03/01/2023 - 01:00
Something is seriously broken Two items this morning should be clues to how around the bend and down the rabbit hole this country has traveled in recent years. Brian Klaas (subscription req’d) posts about the lack of basic standards for elected officials. Looking at you, George Santos: Much of the modern world has created what I call the broken pyramid of scrutiny. In principle, levels of scrutiny and accountability should increase as the potential to do catastrophic harm increases. The higher up the hierarchy you go, the more that you should be monitored to make sure that you’re not going to destroy the company, or bring down the government, from your perch at the top. The least powerful should face the least scrutiny; the most powerful the most oversight. Instead, as I wrote in “Corruptible,” we do the opposite. Santos would have been exposed as a fraud before being offered “any run-of-the-mill government job.” But not in Congress. Klass contrasts the training he had to go to volunteer as a tour guide at an English historical site: In my spare time, I volunteer as a tour guide at a historic site in England. To be allowed to take tours, I had to spend six months learning about the site, pass two exams, spend hours clicking through a series of online training courses, and complete some checks regarding safeguarding. And yet, there are literally zero requirements, zero checks, zero bits of required training for the US president, even though they are given…