The typical politician in Washington knows what his staff tells him, plus whatever he remembers from his prior life. Given the nature of the life, what happened in the before times is a fading memory. Of course, few of these people ever did productive work before they got to Washington. In fact, having ever had a real job is close to a disqualification in politics. As a result, most have always been in politics and this is the peak of their political career.

Those staffers who make up the reality for a politician are not earthy men of the people, spending their days talking with the hoi polloi. They are from a specific class and spend their days socializing and networking with one another. What they know about the world is what they tell one another and what they get from the media. Their main focus is to make sure their guy is on the right side of the current trends and primed to say the right things at the events they organize for him.

Of course, the news of the world that flows from the media to the staffers and then to the politician is not news of the world. The content creators in the media do very little in the way of actual reporting. Their job is to take what is given to them by the agency they are assigned to cover and make it into a story. Most of the time this means taking canned quotes they get via e-mail and using them to salt a narrative, always with the phrase “sources say” to make it sound right.

The government agencies feeding the media have their agenda, which is always about what is good for the agency. Pournelle’s law of bureaucracy is on full display at this point, which means the people dishing to the media are people who care only about the bureaucracy they serve. In modern Washington, it is no longer about power and money, but rather the weird internal competition in the system. Leaks to the media are often about signaling between factions.

Washington itself has become something like an organism. All of its parts have a prime directive and that is to benefit the whole. Their secondary directive is to benefit their part of the whole. This means that everyone inside the organism is surrounded by nothing but other bits of the organism. To be inside the system is to live entirely around those who in one fashion or another serve the whole. Washington is both a system and a collective with its own sense of identity.

This helps explain why the war in Ukraine staggers on with no effort by Washington to make a deal with Moscow to end the war. Objectively, a deal should be easy to make and in the best interests of the West. Russia is not an expansive, ideological state with designs on the rest of Europe. There would be no war in Ukraine if not for the senseless meddling of the neocons that run American foreign policy. Making a deal to end the war basically means Washington stops poking the bear.

We hear nothing like this in Washington. There are zero politicians questioning the sanity of American policy. A few make noises about how the money is being spent, but they do not know why those lines are in their script. The people who put them there, those staffers, saw something about this in the media. The media is told by the Pentagon that there are worries about the accounting. Otherwise, no one questions anything because no one has a reason to question anything.

This dynamic plays out in the bureaucracy too. To be in good standing is to be on the right side of the current initiatives. In this case, everyone who knows what is good for them in the Pentagon makes sure to put on that Ukraine lapel pin. Information about what is happening on the ground leaks into the system, but there is no demand for it, so it sits in unread reports. The current narrative demands different facts, so people are busy getting those facts together.

This is also why we get insane press conferences from the people running the war machine part of the organism. Larry Johnson gives some useful commentary on the absurdity of what Milley and Austin had to say. Both men are reading from a script, prepared by people who care first and foremost about the bureaucracy they serve, which is the Pentagon and the military. They probably know the reality on the ground, but there is no incentive to mention it.

Probably the best example of how the organism works is the catastrophic train derailment in Ohio. The DC pols have nothing to say about it because their staffers have not put it in their scripts. The lone exception is J.D. Vance, the newly minted senator from Ohio, but he has yet to be assimilated. The staffers have no idea where Ohio is or if it is even in America. The reason is the media is full of stories about balloons, weird sex stuff and Trump news.

Here we have the most serious environmental disaster in decades and the organism has yet to respond. The reason is none of the entry points into the organism have pathways linked to the middle of the country. All of those pathways open in coastal cities and only the ones that matter to the organism. Unless what is happening in Ohio poses some risk to the organism, it does not exist for the organism. Ohio could become a dead zone and Washington does not care.

This is why our politics are insane. America is run by what amounts to a closed religious cult that cares only for its internal operations. Like any other organism, it draws sustenance from its surroundings, but unlike any other organism, it has little interaction with its surroundings, other than for defensive purposes. It is why elections have no impact on policy. Whatever the result, what gets sent to the organism is digested and put to use by the organism to defend the organism.

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