To play someone as a fool is risky business. To play an entire populace as a fool is downright edgy.
A case in point is the recent "appointment" by A.G. Garland of one of his troopers, David Weiss, to be "special counsel" the day after impeachment articles were filed against Joe Biden by a member of the U.S. House, per this from Patrick Hilsman of the AP.
Garland's "fool," as so often now the case with the antics of Biden's DOJ, is the American public at large. And guess what: not just the beleaguered Republicans anymore! There are some Dem outliers who are also piping up. So why is Garland not feeling the political climate anymore? (Did he ever?) Garland is, rather, carrying on with the same embarrassing ploys and runarounds (also see Wray's feints) that he has been characteristically accused of since his appointment. Has the A.G. not been made aware that Mr. Weiss — very recently — received a big smack-down in federal court, regarding Hunter Biden's special forever autonomy and proposed "sweetheart deals"?
Garland's obtuse behavior might be credited to The Big Bureaucratic Mistake, in brutally hyperactive form, made by the Biden administration. The Mistake lies in appreciating the federal bureaucracy as a sort of impregnable Citadel (once the U.S. Senate was referred to as such — no longer!), within which the heavily paid and über-benefited bureaucrats within, great and small, may take solace in being citizens who are above the law and even, when push comes to shove, above the American vote.
William Henry Chamberlin, reprised in the Foundation for Economic Education, explicated Gibbons's classic Decline and Fall of Rome thusly:
The Decline and Fall may be interpreted as a process of the atrophy of the individual creative faculty under the enervating influence of a state which went the inevitable way of unlimited power and became constantly more absolutist.
It appears that A.G. Garland has mislaid his God-given share of the "individual creative faculty" — in not thinking through his grotesquely political reactions before he announces them to the American public.
Image via Picryl.