You can't make this shit up!

As the title of this entry says - You can't make this shit up!  We have an admiral in charge of US Navy intelligence who has not been able to see military secrets for years.  Politics and institutional inertia has made it impossible to replace someone in his position, as a replacement must be confirmed by the Senate ....And the GOP isn't approving any of Obama's nominees these days.

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I'm a person who says that the larger the organization, the more inefficient it becomes. There are positions that must be filled - not because the person does that much real work, but is there to be nominally in charge of things.  In short, this position is the interface between the political side of the organization and the side that is responsible for the day to day operation of the organization.

In the case of the Admiral mentioned in the article, he is under suspicion because of a corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and Navy personnel. The Navy had to suspend his access to classified material, but no one would expect that he wouldn't be cleared or indicted over two years later.  So the Navy has had to have a Kafkaesque situation of having this man perform the administrative responsibilities of his job, but have subordinates and colleagues perform ALL the tasks requiring classified information.

Given that we have deadlock between the Executive and Legislative branches of government, there is virtually no chance that we could get a replacement nominated by the President and approved by the Senate in today's toxic environment. So, we have a situation where politics is getting in the way of the Navy doing its job in keeping this country safe.

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What could we do to prevent situations like this from happening?  First, we could have a process developed where certain backup personnel would already be nominated and approved in advance to take over these responsibility while the person nominally in charge is indisposed.  We already have a constitutional amendment which provides for the temporary disability of a president, and who is in power and able to act when he or she is unable to perform his or her duties.  Why not do the same thing for many of these critical positions?

This doesn't address the underlying problem - Political Gridlock.  We are electing leaders in the Executive and Legislative branches who check and balance each others' actions. We are afraid of either party doing anything, so we do not let them do anything.  Neither political party is trustworthy. The success of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 POTUS election cycle is a reflection of the public's disgust for the two political parties who promise the world to their bases, but do not deliver anything - except to the plutocrats who fund their political campaigns.

How can we change this situation?  To me, people have to stop "drinking the toxic Kool-Aid." When Ted Cruz's father, Raphael, says that Obamacare is a plot to bring ISIS terrorists over to the US as Doctors, why aren't the GOP loyalists shouting this lunatic down?  (One could have had many of the same criticisms of leftist extremists, but they have been mostly muted and ignored by the press during this election cycle.) That's because the political elite in the party no longer have much power to keep things in line.  They gave a seat at the table to extremists, and the extremists have since been allowed to bully everyone into submission.

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We have to stop giving the Wingnuts power, and force both political parties to again represent the center. When only one party represents the political center, we run a major risk that our political system will fail totally.  It happened in Central Europe in the 1930's. Can we risk having it happen here?