What’s the Worst 3-Letter Government Agency?
BUCK: What is the worst three-letter agency of the federal government right now? I gotta tell you, people have very strong opinions on this. Not quite as strong as their favorite dog breed or ice cream flavor, but people do get very fired up about the worst three-letter agency. I of course come from the CIA analyst cadre and left and never looked back. I’ve never worked at these other places; so I’m just covering them as all of you are from what they do from their actions.
I would argue though — and I understand people right now are very upset at the FBI. Look. We always had to keep real and be honest. A lot of FBI field offices are going after people who do elder fraud, who are stealing the life savings of senior citizens through different scams. You know, there’s a lot of FBI work going on day in and day out, you know, kidnapping stuff, all kinds of things, right? Kidapping stuff, child exploitation. FBI does some important things day in and day out. It’s when the D.C. office and the political stuff comes into play that all of a sudden we’re like, there’s a big problem here. There is. But I would say, Clay, that there’s a very strong case to be made that the CDC was really more — you know, it was almost like built for this moment of covid, right? This is — if we were watching —
CLAY: This is the CDC Super Bowl.
BUCK: That’s right. Absolutely. CDC Super Bowl. If we’re watching the movie Armageddon, you know, the CDC is NASA when NASA’s trying to figure out how to stop asteroid from destroying the entire planet, right? Like, this is what NASA’s for. That’s what the CDC is for in this context. And I think you can make a serious argument that they got absolutely everything wrong, that they made everything worse during covid, that they showed what a bunch of lib lunatics who really belong in the Wellesley gender studies department were somehow running public health policy at the CDC and in state health agencies in all blue states and a lot of red states around the country, and it’s so bad that even the CDC itself has had to say, “Yeah, about our pandemic response….” But don’t worry, Fauci, the cleanup crew is on the way.
The Fauch is here to say (imitation), “You know what accountability looks like, Clay? It’s when a football team loses by eight touchdowns in the Super Bowl after promising you they would win and then a year or two after the game says, maybe we called the wrong plays.” Here is Fauci saying Walensky deserves praise for coming out and admitting that the CDC is a dumpster fire of crappy.
FAUCI: Realizing and recognizing the shortcomings that have been there for quite a long time, long antedating Dr. Walensky’s tenure. And I think it was the stress and the challenge of a historic pandemic that brought some of those deficiencies into sharp relief. I believe we should commend them for realizing that, particularly Dr. Walensky. There are very, very good people at the CDC. There was an issue with the culture of how they approached their responsibility as a public health agency. But I think it’s now been recognized — so I’m actually optimistic that, given the fact that the problems have now been recognized, that there’s a pathway to making a very good organization much better.
BUCK: He’s a delusional megalomaniac.
CLAY: I wish we could have a real accounting for what would happen, Buck, if we had had someone who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, right? If Dr. Marty Makary had been in charge of the CDC as covid began and if we had had by certainly May and June of 2020, somebody come out and just address the American public, maybe Rand Paul, right? We’ve talked about Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky about what a tremendous difference it would have made if he had been in charge of our covid response, and they had come out and said, effectively, “We can’t do anything to stop this virus from spreading. You probably are going to get it. You may get it more than once. If you are immunocompromised, if you are elderly, it probably makes sense for you to limit your indoor exposure to many different people. Otherwise we have to just keep American life going on. We cannot shut down the country, certainly can’t shut down schools, all those things.”
We talked earlier making hoax about She Hulk, but Marvel’s big thing now is the multiverse, Buck, in other words, everything is going on, many different versions. Is there a world in which tosses says, along with many other countries like Sweden, basically says, we cannot shut down countries, what does everything look like if that had occurred in the United States? I think there’d be way more confidence in the CDC, saying you have to have the individual responsibility to make the right choices for your family. And I wonder what it would have done to our beliefs in institutions in general. Because Rochelle Walensky and the CDC, to me, I don’t trust anything they say about anything.
BUCK: They wouldn’t stand up on a matter of science to the teachers unions —
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: — folks, okay? The CDC showed zero backbone when pushed on by the left wing in this country, by the Democrat Party, by the desire to first defeat Donald Trump and then to prop up Joe Biden and the lunatic vaccine and mask mandates that were entirely ineffective. And it’s also amazing. You know what I’m getting a lot now? You know, I did a podcast, I did a podcast as a guest recently of Paul Rieckhoff, who’s an independent, right? He’s neither Republican or Democrat. And it’s interesting because so many of the responses from that audience — and a lot of people think they’re independents are actually just libs who can’t make good arguments — but so many of the responses are, “Well, all you do is criticize the CDC and Fauci. What else were we gonna do?” And I look at them, I want to say what else were we gonna do? Not a lot of the things that I said, “Don’t do this” at all stages of the pandemic.
This lie that people are telling themselves now that we had no choice. Oh, we had choices the whole time. We had this mashed down our throats by evil little Fauci, by Walensky, by the CDC, the NIH, by the lib media, by Democrats, by leftists, by collectivists, by commies, they made us do all of this. It made not only no difference in terms of stopping the spread, it actually made everything worse in the aggregate.
CLAY: We would have been far better off, Buck, if we had never done anything.
BUCK: And nnow they want to make really even dumber arguments? Well, we had no choice. Yeah, we did. And you all made the wrong choices, libs. The libs made the wrong choices. The double maskers, they should feel ashamed at how duped and dumb they were. This was reckless. It was wrong. And we have our first opportunity to vote based on this. That’s why when I see the generic ballot, Republicans, everything going in this direction, I’m saying, what do people need to see? They want to do this with climate change, Clay. They’re trying to shut down farmers. They want to feed you bugs. You think this collectivist insanity of shutting down churches and controlling every aspect of your life is gonna stop now that covid has become a cold?
CLAY: I think what’s going on with generic ballots — first of all, everybody should vote based on covid and the failures of the Democrats because that’s the purpose of democracy. There should be consequences for getting things right and getting things wrong. And right now what I think is going on is, Buck, things were so bad with inflation, with the border, with crime, people have become inured to it. They just expect that that’s what’s going on right now. And you’re angry as things get worse. But when they hit the bottom, you’ve reached the bottom and there is the sort of acceptance that goes on with it. And sometimes you get that dead cat bounce when you hit the bottom, and I think Biden right now is getting that dead cat bounce. It’s not gonna change anything. Everything is still worse. The Bidas touch is real. But I think a lot of Americans are so used to the awfulness of the Biden regime that there’s a little bit of bounce-back performance right now for Joe Biden.
BUCK: Your top three worst three letter federal agencies. What is in your pantheon of the worst?
CLAY: CDC is number one right now.
BUCK: Me too. CDC number one. What do you put at two and three?
CLAY: I’d probably put the IRS at two, because I think they are just so utterly incompetent. And I dislike the way that they run their business because partly the IRS anger is a function of my anger at the tax code in general because it’s so broken. And then I probably would put — I think your point on the FBI is a good one. There aren’t a lot of FBI agents walking away, but there are a lot of FBI agents who are investigating crimes that matter, and they’re being snowed under relative to the incompetence surrounding the Trump investigations. I’d probably go those three in order.
BUCK: I’d throw the EPA probably at number two just because when you see what they really do and the green agenda stuff — we all want clean water. I got no problem with clean water. I got no problem with making sure there’s no lead in people’s drinking water. That’s great. Sign me on for that. CO2 emissions as an urgent national matter which is what the EPA is focused on is lunacy. So I go probably CDC number one, EPA number two, and, you know, the IRS, yeah, the tax code is awful, but that’s actually Congress’s fault.
CLAY: There’s a little bit of many of you guided blame, I think, there. But anybody has to get my ire , and the fact that IRS is so bad at what they do I think in terms of enforce tax code —
BUCK: Our elected representatives who have built this tens of thousands of pages monstrosity of a tax code that then a bunch of bureaucrats have to enforce; so —
CLAY: I think, by the way, I would knock the FBI out, as angry — the TSA really infuriates me.
BUCK: Really? The TSA, I don’t know, man, we got a lot of TSA folks that listen. I feel like TSA’s got a lot better.
CLAY: I don’t begrudge people for working at the TSA. I don’t think the TSA makes very much difference.
BUCK: I think you could do a better private agency version of the TSA, and I think where the I realize do private security and bring in a lot of people, if they’re qualified and have done a good job from TSA into those roles, essentially think of it like to Blackwaterize the TSA so you have — you know, you — Blackwater —
CLAY: Yeah, for sure.
BUCK: — the contractors, yeah.
CLAY: I think the TSA — first of all, like, taking my shoes off is not making anybody safer. Taking my laptop out I don’t believe is making anybody safer. I just don’t buy that much of what is going on as it pertains to TSA rules and regulations actually works.
BUCK: It is security theater, I totally agree with you. But I’ve got that thing now where they scan your eyeballs Let me tell you. works like a charm.
CLAY: What is that?
BUCK: CLEAR.
CLAY: CLEAR.
BUCK: It’s great. It’s great.
CLAY: They don’t do that for kids; so it doesn’t really make much difference for me. I’m traveling with my kids all the time.
BUCK: I’m flying in coach here and back. I’m not a fancy guy. It costs like a hundred bucks a year, by the way, for the CLEAR thing. But when you see that line of all those people and then you’re told that CLEAR is shut down, you have to go stand. You just feel like, man, I’m in the peasant line today, Clay, it’s rough. It’s rough.
CLAY: I know.
BUCK: Yes. Makes me sad.
