Attributed to Giuseppe Maria Crespi:
Woman Looking For Fleas (c. 1715)

" … the one true sign of their underlying cowardice!"

Security was never gonna be this administration that can't administer anything's strong suit. If loose lips did sink ships, we'd be down a few battle cruisers after only two months with "him" in office. Fortunately, most breaches go unnoticed by allies and enemies. The most damaging ones live on to become exemplars of an administration's performance, bloopers that lived on to become definingly infamous. The amateurs employed by this operation ensured a day like yesterday would eventually come around, where a group of senior officials engaged in top-secret government business on an insecure private network with an inadvertently invited journalist listening in. This arrangement violated more laws than it respected, though few doubt that what it represented has been a typical scenario since this incumbent took office. I know from a recent conversation with an old friend who works at the USDA that they, too, communicate via Signal, though that violates multiple communication preservation and security protocols. It should surprise nobody that this incumbent, who scoffs at almost everything, also routinely scoffs at security laws.

When confronted with the evidence of this egregious security breach, our new Secretary of Defense (SecDeaf) responded by screaming at the questioning reporter, thoughtfully channeling his emotional age as if anybody was likely to guess differently. Sometimes, in the recent Republican history of that department, that secretary became the de facto Secretary of Defensiveness, and his entire department, our in-house Military/Industrial Complex, became the reflexive arm of our security mechanisms, our Insecurity Department dedicated to continually rendering us demonstrably less safe. They'd rarely sleep. Such operations exist as the playtoys of their officials. Our incumbent, for instance, dabbles in military matters the same way an infant commands their bathtub fleet. He's not above or beneath sinking his ships in a fit of pique. When secrets escape, he's inevitably the leak. He demonstrates expected comportment by vigorously denying any knowledge or accusing the questioning reporter of lying, both of which turn out to be reliable tells that he's on the defensive and lying again. He's rarely not. Often, the truth turns out to be the opposite of whatever escapes his yap.

The need to translate into the negative to understand underlying meaning has been a constant among Republican politicians since way before Reagan's administration. However, I admit that Reagan certainly improved on the practice. He employed his acting experience to deliver absolutely believable lies. He was so skilled that he could bring even the most dedicated non-believer to tears as he peddled his untruths. Since then, whenever a Republican introduced a bill, one could be sure that its purpose was orthogonal to the actual title of the bill. A bill labeled Tax Relief would, to be sure, promote raising taxes, and anything labeled Peace would fund some war somewhere. It became a simple matter of flipping their messages upside down, though this was not always a purely simple matter in practice. Trying to imagine the opposite of some concepts could strain anyone's brain. Surely a bill introduced as Health Care wasn't promoting Contagion? One could never be sure, and we learned to presume the worst because better than that often proved ruinously optimistic. One could be confident whatever they proposed would prove worse than expected, though, once again, mere imagination often proved inadequate for that task.

The State Department became the Snake Department the moment the Senate approved the incumbent's choice for Secretary of "State," a man he had always shamelessly derided as "little." He was obviously compromised the moment he accepted the invitation to assume the position. It seemed like a prisoner marrying his torturer. It was a match probably not precisely made in anybody's Heaven. But then the messages he'd be expected to transmit seemed especially crafted to humiliate the messenger. Many of them were so nonsensical that nobody could imagine what they meant. It seemed as if diplomacy had become the purview of a third-rate insult comic paid by the absurdist punchline. Our painstakingly crafted international relationship networks became the laughingstock of every one of our former counterparts. How to lose both friends and influence with others, our international relations narrowed to three or four formerly fourth-rate adversaries. If anyone had told me that security under this administration would even approach these levels of absurdity, not even I, a dedicated skeptic where this crowd is concerned, would have been able to believe them.

The problem with the more egregious forms of negative space must be that they always remain so fundamentally unbelievable. Nobody could have possibly foreseen what their fever dream reality commenced dishing out under the studied tutelage of the truly incompetent. It's like envisioning the opposite of orange or the loving relationship between good and evil. Such things remain rightfully unimaginable. The truth eventually always appears, though it might sometimes take years to find the light. Any administration, even one not all that interested in actually administering anything, might be well-advised to limit the outright misrepresentations and lies. Still, this one doubles down under this pressure. They seem to possess an almost unshakable belief in the rightness of their wrongness, and this notion alone guarantees continuing entertainment value, if not necessarily WWIII. These people seem to be fundamentally Insecure in their own identities and abilities, so they over-compensate. They don't just breach security protocols; they produce the most egregious security breach in history. They don't just violate their oaths of office; they commit treason in real-time, on stage, under blinding lights, as if daring any patriot to contradict their performance. I have personally rarely felt less secure. They've rewritten the founding notion of our Constitution. Instead of securing a common defense, they've so far successfully secured a truly uncommon defensiveness, the one true sign of their underlying cowardice!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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