It’s been a disastrous, discrediting week for Biden’s deep state

It’s become a trope on the Right, as it’s been on the Left for decades, that Washington is home to a nefarious deep state. A secret state within a state that illegally manipulates events and serves its own secret needs, not those of the people. But what if the deep state is mostly just incompetent?

That’s the central theme of the Coen brothers’ hilarious 2008 film Burn After Reading. The movie depicts our spy agencies as nests of scheming bureaucrats who have conspiratorial intentions. Except that they’re just too inept to pull off their schemes. Based on my own experience, I can confirm that, on its bad days, our intelligence community resembles nothing so much as an enormously expensive and secretive Department of Motor Vehicles.