Oooopsie!

There’s a Keystone Kops/Three Stooges vibe to all this, but let's not laugh too hard...

It may go down as the butt dial of the century.

Journalist-types are always agitating for government transparency, but including the editor of the Atlantic magazine in a text-message string planning air attacks on Houthi bases in Yemen was, by any standard, carrying things a bit far. But, the fact that the Secretary of Defense, Vice President, and other denizens of Washington officialdom included on the call had no clue that Jeff Goldberg had been listening in until he published an account of the incident raises a whole raft of serious questions.

I think most folks will agree that randomly butt-dialing secret war plans is probably a bad idea. What inquiring minds want to know is: How the heck did that happen?

By now, pretty much everybody’s been on one end or the other of a butt dial. Somebody gets careless stuffing a phone in a pocket or whatever and somebody else’s life is interrupted. Generally, a quick, semi-sincere apology ensues and the whole thing is forgotten…unless it involves F-18 strikes and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Yeah, there’s careless and then there’s careless…

My grandfather was a careful man. A lifetime working around bulls, draft horses, and unforgiving farm machinery taught him how a moment’s carelessness could be the ruination of more than just a day. When a 12-year-old grandson wrapped a four-row corn planter around a gatepost after overconfidently taking the turn onto the field drive in fourth gear, Grandpa’s only reaction was a disappointed sigh, “That’s what comes of being careless…

Surveying the last sixty days in Washington -- butt dialed war plans and all – Grandpa got it so, so right…That’s what comes of being careless.

It’s telling that, looking up and down the recipient list of that now-notorious text thread, the fellow with perhaps the deepest understanding of national security policy was the guy who was butt dialed in. It’s amateur hour in the highest echelons of our federal government…the folks with know-how being fired willy-nilly and folks who don’t know how are making decisions as if they did.

We shouldn’t be surprised when that ends badly.

It’s purest speculation on my part, but I have a hunch that the veep, the defense secretary and the whole cabal were using a messaging app available to any seventh-grader wanting to keep secrets from his mom rather than the high-security Defense Department communication system because sometime in the past sixty-days’ shuffle Elon pink-slipped the guy with the passwords -- locking them all out.

There’s a Keystone Kops/Three Stooges vibe to all this that invites ridicule – and ridicule is appropriate – but let’s not laugh so hard we miss the potential seriousness of our situation.

At a glance, our government is taking on the look of a clown show – a collection of oddballs, misfits, sleazeballs and billionaires selected at random for reasons best left unknown. Expertise is out on the street and agencies are shuttered in a great purge of the woke, the diverse, and the independent.

Trouble is, the woke, the diverse, and the independent are often the able, the skilled, and the knowledgeable as well.

So, let us learn from Comrade Stalin, past master of the purge…

To be suspected of being less than absolutely loyal to the leader was to be cast out in the late 1930s Soviet Union. By 1937, Stalin’s suspicions fell on the officer corps of the Red Army with fatal results for Marshal of the Soviet Union Michail Tukhachevsky and the replacement of a great many experienced ranking commanders with politically reliable, militarily naive flunkies. This system held together until June, 1941, when Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa smashed through the ineptly managed Soviet defenses to the outskirts of Moscow – finally brought to a halt by the howling winds of the Russian winter. Faced with cold reality, the surviving purged officers were re-rounded up and returned to their units to turn the tide.

Let’s hope someone is keeping Dr. Fauci’s phone number on file for when the bird flu breaks into the human population.

Saving us may take another butt dial

.