What This War Needs Is an Energetic Round of Firings
Yea! James Lileks' Newhouse column of today!

[...] For that matter, a vigorous round of firings throughout the government would be a heartening sign.

FBI agents who blew the 20th hijacker investigation: You're fired, and a Scarlet I for "Incompetence" shall ever be burned on your resume. Norman Mineta, whose ideal planeload consists of 50 unfrisked young male Saudis and 10 old Hispanic ladies who got full body-cavity searches, protected by pilots armed with joy-buzzers: You're fired.

Tom Ridge, who gives the impression of Frankenstein attempting to comprehend quantum physics: The color code for your future in your job is black. Pentagon leakers: fired. The entire State Department Bureau of Craven Appeasement: canned. And before you leave, shred your memos on how Yasser Arafat likes his boot licked, please.

While we're at it, why do the heads of the FBI and CIA still have jobs? The 9/11 attack should have compelled honorable men to fall on their swords. Fire them all.

Fire lots and lots; bring in new minds and fresh blood. Get everyone on the same page -- and don't leak the page to the paper just so you can feel important when you're quoted on Page One. Otherwise one might suspect that the bureaucracy's job is less important than protecting the jobs of the bureaucrats.

Well, it's all well and good to say "fire them all," but we career bureaucrats understand that firing all of us would cripple an already crumbling system--see, we have what's called "institutional memory." It is this body of knowledge which simply cannot be duplicated by rubes walking in off the street. We know where the rubber bands are kept, we know how to make the elevator work when it keeps bypassing floors, we know the best places to take naps, we can lose more important paperwork behind one filing cabinet in one day than the entire private sector can in months, we know which appliances to unplug to make sure the microwave doesn't kick off the breaker--the list goes on and on. Go ahead--fire us all! See if we tell you where the security tape of the woman changing in the elevator is kept!
posted by Terry at 2:16:00 PM