When is a government job not in the interest of the American People? Well, one good sign is when the job’s purpose is for the bureaucrat to gain personally while the people in general suffer. Bureaucrats work for the people, at the pleasure of the people. When the people become their pawns we have lost what is the essence of America’s government.

When this reversed relationship involves money it is clearly bad, and a crime. It is ‘bribery’ and we have seen a lot of it in Congress, from cold hard cash in freezers to former war heros lining their pockets from government contracts. But sometimes the battle of egos on DC can take on a different kind of abuse of the people. Were the payback is something less tangible than dollars. And we have a clear case of that going on today as well as Congress and the FAA make wild and exaggerated claims about safety as they grand stand in front of the TV cameras and the brain dead news media. The result of this power struggle has been the lives of 300,000 Americans have been disrupted while people in DC use them to make news – and for no good reason.

I noted previously that to understand the essence of the fiasco DC brought on the air travelers of this nation, who are just trying to do their jobs and live their lives, was to look at the results. Was the action by the FAA an emergency to save lives, or a ploy to teach Congress a lesson for showboating false safety claims last month. The truth lay in the results – was a single unsafe plane found. Did they stop a plane from falling from the sky in the next flight or two. The answer is ‘no’!

American Airlines canceled 3,115 flights this week, including 596 flights on Friday, to bring its fleet of MD-80 aircraft into full compliance with FAA technical directives. Another couple hundred flights could be canceled Saturday. This disruption has inconvenienced about 300,000 passengers and will cost the airline tens of millions of dollars.

American’s planes weren’t in imminent danger. Some of them weren’t compliant with an FAA airworthiness directive regarding the wrapping on a 6-foot-long bundle of wires leading to a hydraulic pump in the right wheel well. Some ties were not spaced correctly. They should all have been an inch apart; some were an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half. American acknowledges it discovered one tie spacing that measured 4 inches. Some clamps faced one way and they should have faced another.

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The wire-spacing issue didn’t catch anyone by surprise. Four years ago, American, Boeing and the FAA developed a plan to avoid chafing problems with the wire bundle.

Was this an emergency that required a ruinous halt to the MD-80’s? Well no, because the FAA and the airlines had been working on this problem for four years!. So why cry ‘fire’ now? As I said, it was because Congress tried to make a public PR spectacle last month against the FAA and how it works. There were lots of options available to the FAA, other than their version of headline grabbing:

Last week’s fiasco with American Airlines could have been avoided — and without undermining the FAA’s push to improve safety. Instead, the agency threw the book at American, and the airline had to ground much of its fleet, cancel 3,000 flights and disrupt the lives of more than a quarter-million people.

That would be an appropriate response if the public faced an imminent threat. But the only urgency here was politics, and a regulatory agency used the equivalent of its nuclear option to demonstrate some backbone.

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In that context, maybe it’s not surprising that American flights were grounded, because plastic clips were about a quarter-inch too far apart on wire bundles. Never mind that American found no evidence of damaged wires, which is the threat behind the safety initiative.

Or that American and other airlines were given the past 18 months to wrap the wires in a protective sleeve. Maybe American didn’t wrap them exactly right, but that lapse doesn’t sound like an imminent threat.

And if last week’s action was a penalty for missing a deadline — rather than a move to keep unsafe planes out of the air — how about slapping American with a fine and letting 300,000 customers get to their destinations?

The NY Times exposes the truth – sort of:

What happened?

One answer is that some whistle-blower inspectors for the Federal Aviation Administration disclosed that they had been discouraged from cracking down on Southwest Airlines for maintenance problems, and they found a sympathetic audience with some Washington lawmakers.

‘Whistle-blowers’ are the bread-and-butter of the news media and usually they are not convincing or under-whelming in their claims. They can be stooges or vindictive employees as often or not. I have fisked many ‘technicians’ who think they have found secret NSA listening devices and are pawned off by technical ignoramuses as witnesses to crimes. It is like saying a butcher can understand how neuro-surgery is performed and should be called as an expert witness at competency hearing for a real surgeon.

What all this actually is folks is the partisan wars in DC – which use lawsuits and faked stories in the media to gain an edge in their political power struggle – coming to our backyards, coming into our lives. Instead of waging war on themselves, the pols and bureaucrats have decided to make life uncomfortable for all of us to show us who is boss. Since a two-bit ambassador fed lies about forged documents to a gullible press, backed up by his CIA wife, we have seen slander and libel flying in DC. And if you want to go back farther it was all the rage during the Clinton’s years too.

After at least 16 years (and maybe more) of blood sport politics we have created a culture in DC where people don’t do their jobs, they try to do a job on their political opponents. Instead of working for the people they spend time leaking false claims about federal programs (some having to do with national security) into the media propaganda houses (euphemistically called ‘news’ organizations) to bash their opponents. When in fact it is those not doing their jobs who should be the ones bashed for playing while at work.

It has come time to clean house in DC folks. I don’t care which party you favor, the fact is Congress sucks and we have dead wood in the bureaucracies aiming for political patronage from the elected leaders. And now we are all paying the price for it as these people use their positions to disrupt America. We have seen weeks of travel horrors from Congress and FAA infighting. We have seen our national security damaged and exposed to our enemies because of infighting between Congress, The President and the NSA-FIS Court. We have seen lies presented to us as facts by a media who doesn’t have the educational capabilities to grasp what it has taken the responsibility to report on.

It is time to clean house folks. Or else we will see more disruptions from the partisan civil war going on in DC. The pawns are the bosses, and it is about time we showed those in DC we have the final say.