Back when I ran a small-town paper, for a short time we had a feature popular in the era, the “man on the street” interview.
Beside six pictures of locals, mouths agape, we’d have their takes — with very few words, and even less insight — on an issue of the day.
Once as I made my “man on the street” assignment, a reporter reacted with, “You mean ‘ignoramus on the street’?”
Every day under the new administration in the nation’s capital is that.
Sidewalk know-it-alls who have window-shopped their way around governing are doing the thing now, flipping switches and turning spigots.
It’s open house for crackpots and know-everythings, with unvetted job offers at the welcome table along with the pastries.
Elon Musk has brought a seasoned group of hungry gawkers.
Kash Patel, having converted podcasting stardom into an actual job, gets to run the FBI. Why the heck not? Job 1: “Guard photocopier against wokeness.”
Former Fox Spews hair model Pete Hegseth, our new secretary of defense, will “restore lethality” to the military, or at least say that 30 times per minute, teeth gleaming.
Comes a cavalcade of MAGA ideologues, mega donors and favor-mongerers who served a leader whose most recent occupation was full-time criminal defendant:
It’s Amateur Hour.
“Government is the problem.” Brace for dumb policy that meets the motto.
As swaths of Los Angeles burned recently, jumping to any conclusion that would win him airtime on Fox before his inauguration, the greatest pretender of all made the unfounded case that a lack of water was to blame.
So, when he became president again, the Orange Flame ordered the release of billions of gallons of water from two key reservoirs under control of the Corps of Engineers.
Problem: those reservoirs are nowhere near where they might have helped. The releases ended up flooding fields at the worst possible time or flowing to the sea. Most seriously, they will deprive farms for which the water was being stored.
A Day 1 debacle for a Day 1 dictator.
Came Day 2. As if Musk’s Team DOGE had any authority at all, it fired a whole bunch of people at the National Nuclear Security Station. It turned out that many of those pink-slipped were assigned to monitor our nukes. The Oops Patrol rescinded the order.
You see, guys, it’s one thing to push all the buttons on the elevator. It’s another to push all buttons connected to the nuclear arsenal.
“They’re pulling levers without knowing what’s at the other end.”
That quote comes from Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former high official in the U.S. Agency for International Development, where Musk first trained his fiscal shotgun blast.
Unlike the man on the street, Konyndyk knows what he’s talking about.
USAID is the most vital player in U.S. foreign aid, going where it’s needed the most. It addresses the toughest situations like starvation in war-torn Sudan and struggling-to-survive Ukraine.
Foreign aid, important to know, takes up less than 1 percent of federal spending, though Street-Corner Man is certain it’s the key reason for the nation’s deficit. Just ask him.
It’s all so clear-cut for people who don’t get governing anyway – whether it be public health, public schools, public libraries, national parks or diplomacy around the world.
President Blob’s shoot-first gesture in international relations is a trade war that will cost American consumers immeasurably.
He lied over and over on the campaign trail that foreign competitors would pay for this. Nope. Tariffs are de facto sales taxes. And whom do sales taxes hurt most? Those people who have the least.
I’m not sure how any of the Big Guy’s enablers – er, advisers — didn’t point out the role tariffs played in the Great Depression. It was bigly.
One must wonder why, after he decided Mexico and Canada were sufficiently brow-beaten, he pulled back from threatened trade sanctions against them for now.
If tariffs are so good for us, why not just go full bore? Damn the concessions. Stick it to our neighbors.
These things hardly matter to those who know the least and are most tickled by culture-war gestures to “own the libs.”
To them, dark-skinned intruders are eating our pets. And drag queens are running our universities.
At least that’s the view from the ignoramus on the street.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
