And there's a reason. There is a certain bar that has to be cleared before I start reading or listening. The bar of plausibility. Suppose someone tells you that I walk into a room and start ranting, at high volume, using words that brought George Carlin to the US Supreme Court. Does this clear the bar of plausibility?
Um... have you read this blog? Of course it does! I am loud and profane, to the degree that one accepts the validity of the concept of profanity as it relates to language in that manner. I don't, but that's kind of the point.
On the other hand, suppose someone tells you that same story about The Dalai Lama. Would you believe it? See what I mean? Bar of plausibility.
So, the FBI. I don't spend a lot of time teaching about the bureaucracy. Mostly, it's boring. By definition, pretty much. One of the few lessons I try to impart is the nature of "the principal-agent problem." This is an important observation in social science that there will often be problems in the implementation of decisions when the decision-maker (the principal) a) has different preferences from the person charged with carrying out the decision (the agent), b) has limited capacity to observe the agent, and c) has few tools with which to punish the agent if the agent "shirks." This is often the case in the executive branch, in which executive employees have civil service protection, which exist to prevent corruption. Presidents are partisans, and the employees of certain agencies will not always have preferences that match the ideological preferences of the president. EPA employees, and Labor Department employees, for example, will generally be at ideological odds with a Republican president. When I needed an agency to list that would be at odds with a Democratic president, I always used...
The FBI.
No agency is 100% Democratic or 100% Republican, and even people who are partisans can sometimes break from their parties. Civil service protection is intended to create independence. However, if there is any agency that one should expect, a priori, to be Republican, it is the FBI. It really was the example I had been using in class, for years and years, of an agency one should expect to be at odds with Democrats, and aligned with Republicans.
Add to that the fact that Comey intervened in the 2016 election, announcing a re-opened bullshit investigation into Clinton's emails, less than two weeks prior to the election in violation of the DoJ's formal policy, against the advice of the Attorney General and everyone involved, swinging the election to Donald Trump....
Like I said, bar of plausibility. Is there a deep state conspiracy against Trump at the FBI?
Did Hillary Clinton murder Vince Foster? No. That was total fucking bullshit. How about the IRS going after conservative groups? Nope. Absolute fucking lie. ACORN? Bullshit. "Fast and Furious?" Complete fabrication. Obama's Kenyan birth? Lie. Death panels? Bull fucking shit. Shirley Sherrod? Wow, yeah, nobody learned their lesson before firing her? I could keep going, but there is so much fucking bullshit...
Fucking PIZZAGATE! (Hi, Michael Flynn Jr.!)
There is so much fucking bullshit that if someone tells me that the FBI is part of a liberal deep state conspiracy against Trump, the bar of plausibility isn't cleared, and the people spewing it have lost the right to be heard out.
At some point, I will probably have to dig through this bullshit. At some point, I had to wade through all of the bullshit conspiracy theories about Obama's birth.
Who kept those going? Oh, yeah. Donald Fucking Trump.
Remind me why I am supposed to pay attention to this deep state bullshit about how the FBI is a liberal organization?
For the record, I'm not changing my lectures on the principal-agent problem. Instead, I'll be adding a section explaining that Donald Trump is a paranoid idiot, a narcissist, a pathological liar, and probably the most corrupt president in history.
Because he is.
