Trumps Bad. Sadly, Hes Not Alone. – The New York Times

The inspector generals report about the F.B.I.s Russia investigation offered a hideous Dorian Gray portrait of the once-vaunted law enforcement agency. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times, the report uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process. The F.B.I. run by Comey and McCabe was sloppy, deceitful and cherry-picking relying on nonsense spread by Christopher Steele.

With the stunning and sad Afghanistan Papers, The Washington Post revealed what we knew in our hearts: We have spent 18 years and a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, with generals lying and hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, just as the generals did in Vietnam. As one general conceded, they did not understand Afghanistan and didnt have the foggiest notion of what they were doing.

Even as President Barack Obama escalated the war, poured in more billions and promised to crack down on corruption, The Post said, the United States looked away and let its allies the Afghan president, warlords, drug traffickers and defense contractors wallow in fraud, corruption and dark money.

Then theres The Report, streaming on Amazon, the heroic saga of Daniel Jones, played by Adam Driver. Jones is working for Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Intelligence Committee and spends years compiling a report documenting the C.I.A.s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in secret prisons, a barbaric, un-American and ineffective system designed by two creepy psychologists who were paid about $81 million by the C.I.A.

The movie is not kind to Barack Obama and Denis McDonough, suggesting that they protected the C.I.A. and tried to bury grisly details from the report to fend off criticism that Obama was weak on terrorism. It is also a harsh portrayal of Brennan, MSNBCs Voice-of-Morality, who, as C.I.A. director, fought the Senate inquiry so hard that his operatives even clandestinely hacked into the computer network of committee staff members to figure out how they were getting their information.

If this werent enough institutional perfidy for one week, we had the Boeing hearing in Congress: An F.A.A. analysis done after the first deadly crash off the coast of Indonesia showed that the agency knew that if it did not act, the Boeing 737 Max was likely to crash 15 times in the 45 years it was expected to fly, theoretically killing more than 2,900 people. But that wasnt enough to immediately ground it. The government is supposed to protect us from the greedy capitalists, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, this climate of confusion and cynicism allows Trump to prosper. He did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it.

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