Kevin Williamson at his snarky, silver-tongued best: Laziness, Stupidity, Corruption — and the Gun-Control Debate

Read the whole thing at NRO, about the not-particularly bright bureaucrats who arbitrarily stick names on the no-fly list. Excerpts:

But sorting out the criminals and malefactors from the law-abiding and peaceable is very difficult and demanding work, which is why we pay the ladies and gentlemen in our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies so much to do it. (Two hundred grand a year goes a long way in Philadelphia.) Conservatives are naturally inclined to indulge the police, but the fact is that the run of them are specimens of what you get when you take the same lazy unionized public-teat-suckling lumps over at the DMV and put guns on their hips and tell them that they are “at war” with the people they serve. Our intelligence guys aren’t in the main Blackford Oakes or James Bond: They’re drones compiling Excel reports until their pensions kick in. 

And this:

On the matter of ordinary workaday murders of the South Chicago and North Philadelphia type, it cannot be repeated enough that the majority of the killers — 90 percent in New York City according to a New York Times review of the data — have prior criminal histories, often for violent crime, frequently involving weapons offenses. Chicago, among other cities, does basically nothing to prosecute crimes involving the illegal possession of guns. For all the clucking about straw-purchasers — phony buyers who help criminals avoid background checks when acquiring guns — the U.S. attorney’s office for blood-soaked Chicago won’t even bother with those cases as a matter of policy. Why? Too much work, not enough juice. Nobody’s career gets made by putting some South Side gangster’s mom in the pokey for making a straw purchase of a Glock for her beloved son.

The Democrats and their intellectually corrupt apologists at the New York Times and elsewhere are willing to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, to micturate from a great height upon the entire concept of due process, and to treat all of us like criminals — while doing precisely nothing to prevent school shootings, terrorism, or ordinary crime — because they don’t have the guts to tell their political clients in the schools, the mental-health bureaucracies, and the criminal-justice system that eventually they are going to have to do their goddamned jobs in exchange for the hundreds of billions of dollars we lavish upon them.

Conclusion:

It is time for Americans to grow up and to sober up. It may push your soy-latte buttons every time Bubba down in Muleshoe, Texas, buys a scary-looking black gun and declares war upon a row of defenseless Budweiser cans, but inconveniencing Bubba isn’t going to get the job done. Laziness, stupidity, corruption: The U.S. government exists for the sole purpose of protecting the rights of U.S. citizens, but somehow the fine minds at the New York Times conclude that the federal government should do more to burden the citizens to whom it owes every duty than, say, so-called refugees from Syria to whom the U.S. government has no duty whatsoever. Why? Because the alternative is expecting the employees of our federal, state, and local governments to do their duties, and that is just too much work.  

Kevin Williamson has an outstanding article on the negative effects of pervasive corruption/incompetence in government: A Deeper Naginism

Go to NRO and read the whole thing.  I had trouble excerpting this article because there's so much of substance, but a few excerpts are below (emphasis mine):

The damages of Ray Nagin’s crimes may not amount to very much, but the damages inflicted by Naginism are staggering.

Combined federal, state, and local spending in the United States is about the same as it is in Canada, so it is not as if we were starving our public sector to death. The problem is that our institutions are not full of Canadian budgeters, Finnish school administrators, and Swiss train conductors. They are full of Ray Nagins. 

Many of the most important factors driving economic growth are beyond direct political control.

But there is a critical variable that is at least partly within the direct control of government: the quality of government. The quality of government — its honesty, competence, reliability, and predictability — has an effect on most of the important economic variables. And not just government itself, but other institutions with the power to shape public life, such as unions and large firms. Quality is something outside of and different from policy specifics, which is why similar policies often produce wildly different outcomes in different polities: Single-payer health care in Bahrain turns out to be very different from single-payer health care in Canada. A high level of government-enforced union involvement has been catastrophic for the U.S. automotive industry but not for the German automotive industry, which is a lot less of a mystery than it seems when you account for the fact that the UAW is not IG Metall, GM is not Audi, and the U.S. government is not the German government.

There is no way to put a happy face on this fact: Critical American institutions are of shockingly low quality. Corruption is a part of that: At No. 19 on the Transparency International rankings, the United States is tied with Uruguay. Its transparency score of 73 is far behind where you want to be, among such category leaders as Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, and Finland (91, 91, 89, and 89, respectively). We lag well behind our Canadian neighbors and such important international competitors as Germany. Our overall standing is not terrible, but it does not place us among global leaders, either. Moderation in the pursuit of honesty is no virtue.