Uncle Sam’s grasping, slippery fingers

Perhaps inevitably, stories about missed opportunities to detect and either deport the Tsarnaev brothers, or at least keep closer tabs on them, are emerging.  Judicial Watch has been saying for days that the elder scumbag, Tamerlan, could have been deported after a 2009 domestic violence bust.  

Now the New York Times reports that a foreign government actually warned the FBI in 2011 that Tamerlan might be worth keeping an eye on.  Despite that warning, the six months he spent overseas in 2012 to the terrorist hotbeds of Chechnya and Dagestan apparently didn’t raise any red flags.  No one from our titanic super-government even noticed that Tamerlan was running a YouTube channel stuffed with terrorist videos.

I thought the entire point of creating the Department of Homeland Security was to foster inter-agency communication and information sharing.  But when it comes to performing its official duties, the Leviathan State is as blind and besotted with ideology as ever, especially with the inept Janet Napolitano at the helm.  She seems more interested in pumping resources into warnings about the dangers of anti-tax protesters, military veterans, and so forth.

This institutional sloppiness is hardly confined to the War on Terror.  All of our billion-dollar welfare programs are riddled with sickening levels of fraud, which the government perpetually but fruitlessly promises to correct.  But the same people want to drop another pile of laws on the law-abiding, and take the first steps in creating that national gun registry they’ve been daydreaming about.  They don’t even know how many illegal aliens are currently on U.S. soil, but trust them, they’ll be able to process them all onto a smooth “pathway to citizenship,” picking out the most undesirable candidates for return to their home countries, assessing fines and back taxes along the way.  They’re not even trying to measure border security any more, but trust them, it’s in great shape.  Billions of “stimulus” dollars surge past every rational safeguard and pour down the gaping maws of “green energy” bankruptcy sinkholes, or simply vanish into thin air.  The assertion that government is best qualified to manage our health-care system has already degenerated into a painfully unfunny joke.  

It’s the combination of ineptitude and lust for power that gives Big Government its special charm.  If the Obama crew got the new powers and funds they keep clamoring for, they wouldn’t know what to do with them.  They’d just do a quick victory lap around Capitol Hill, and then immediately begin whining that they’re still not rich and powerful enough.