I TOLD YOU TRUMP WOULD WIN; NOW I’LL TELL YOU WHY HE WON

12/23/16

A few days before the election, yours truly told you that Donald Trump would win the presidency.  (See TRUMP WILL WIN, AND WINBIG, ON TUESDAY, 11/4/16)   Now I’m going to tell you why he won the presidency.

Mr. Trump has asked Boeing to price out an F/A-18 Super Hornet competitor to the Lockheed Martin F-35, a new generation fighter plane whose costs have ballooned into a grotesque caricature of all that is wrong with modern defense procurement.   Leaving aside the merits of the F/A-18 vs. F-35 in terms of capability, one would think it would make sense to introduce some genuine competition into the process before we spend $250 billion or so on a weapons system or, of course, on any government program.   And one would think that Mr. Trump, who has made a few dollars negotiating deals, might be the right man to put some competitive pressure on Lockheed or, if Lockheed can’t bring its bid back into the realm of reality, on Boeing.   However, in the brave new world that his hopefully being shown the door, one would be wrong.

Daniel Gordon, who, as President Obama’s administrator for federal procurement policy, has the type of experience in defense procurement that the Dems, and many Republicans, are tittering that Mr. Trump and his team lack, “argues”

“The government would be violating the law to award a contract to Boeing without a competition unless they go through exceptions to the normal legal requirements for competition.”

Hmm…

So the government cannot introduce competition into one of its largest procurement deals because doing so would violate the “normal legal requirements for competition.”

To decry such an argument as an exercise in pretzel logic gives the argument too much credit; it is not pretzel logic, it is anti-logic.   This is just the latest example of the type of thinking that has permeated government policy for at least the last generation.   The people are being told that everything that was once logical and rational is now dated, even archaic, thinking because a new generation, a governing class, has declared it so.   The sound thinking that built this country is scoffed at and laughed at in favor of procedures and “normal legal requirements” that reflect the twisted, faculty lounge thinking of a generation of lifelong feasters at the public trough who have suddenly figured it all out.  

People are tired of being told that they are idiots, that they ought to just sit back and let their betters, who come up with “normal legal requirements” that, among other things, forbid competition in the interest of fostering competition, govern them.   And who is the poster child for the condescending attitude that so rightly irks, irritates, even infuriates, the average citizen?   The 2016 Democratic candidate for president.   The public’s revulsion at the anti-logic that reflects the elitist thinking that permeates government was so strong that they chose Donald Trump, a manifestly imperfect man, as the vehicle to deliver a solid, and hopefully permanent, kick in the hindquarters to the governing class that has gotten it all so very, very wrong for at least the last twenty years.