Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Horseshoes, hand grenades and outsourcing

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: October 22, 2013 1 minute 1 comment

The Great Cartoon Insight Famine continues, and, with the shutdown (sorry, "partial" shutdown) over, the major issue now is that a bad web site means the entire overhaul of the healthcare system is a complete failure.

I believe I flogged the issue sufficiently yesterday, but I thought Jim Morin's cartoon showed some insight, if not a lot of analysis. And that's okay: As long as you don't misrepresent the facts, a cartoonist isn't required to do a complete analysis.

And yes indeedy, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

I've said before that, if I did have an FBI file in the 60s, it was most likely a single sheet of paper with an index of more interesting files in which my name appeared on a list of innocent bystanders.

Still, it was kind of an insult to my street cred that my wife was able to get a security clearance without someone at least calling to ask if I'd gotten a haircut.

The paranoid, of course, would say they already knew, but I'm more in the camp that says Bernardine Dohrn could have gotten a security clearance if she'd wanted one.

My cynicism stems in part from the fact that, while the feds were openly watching a house I lived in because a draft counselor had lived in the basement and a couple of editors of the campus paper lived on the second floor, the clearly insane black militant heroin dealer next door never got busted until he got on a plane with a gym bag full of guns.

And it was the stewardesses who called security once he was aboard, in those days before pre-flight screenings.

But it also comes from the fact that, having gotten said clearance, my wife's job quickly convinced us of the ineptitude of even non-Hoover-directed governmental oversight.

I'm not going to say specifically what she was doing, but it involved being a tech editor at a company that had a contract for some computer programming that was being installed in a large man-made cavern just outside of Colorado Springs.

Her initial "I shouldn't be telling you this" revelations were of the amazing things we could do with technology.

But that quickly faded as she became disillusioned with how the private sector and government interacted.

She'd gotten her early start in newspapers where, if an error got past the editor, it was still you who took the hit, but where most publishers maintained a phalanx of editors to make sure it didn't happen.

Yes, it was a very, very long time ago.

But she'd also worked in other private enterprises where screwing up was not on the agenda, mostly because word would get out and it would reduce the likelihood of future profits.

So she was kind of disheartened to find herself working at a company whose goal was to make all their deadlines in order to protect their government contract.

Regardless of whether the program actually worked.

Worst case scenario was that somebody would figure out that it didn't work and they'd send it back and you'd have to fix it, but then you'd get a new deadline.

And there was also a good chance that you'd luck out: They wouldn't catch the flaws and you'd get away with it.

(Important note: This was a dozen years before we began downsizing government and outsourcing its work to the private sector.)

Now, the company did eventually lose the contract, so there is that.

But there was no huge kerfuffle over why, and it may just be that they were outbid on a renewal. As far as snicking off heads for having done lousy work, everyone was offered relocation in either California or DC.

And all's well that ends well. The Soviets never blew us up because they wrecked their economy by invading Afghanistan instead (insert ironic observation) and Skylab torqued down in the Australian outback without hitting anyone.

No harm, no foul.

But, no, I wasn't all that surprised when Healthcare.gov didn't just snap right into place on opening day. Disappointed, yes. Surprised? Nah. They hit the deadline, right?

"Close enough for government work" is not just an expression, but, then again, I hear other stories that I probably shouldn't about our technical capabilities that are genuine jaw-droppers. We don't screw up everything.

And this one has been more of a public relations snafu than anything that actually impacts the ACA itself, except, as noted yesterday, to the very large extent that public perception is more important than facts.

Which brings us to Tom Toles' current offering:

Ted Cruz is demanding that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius resign over the failure of the Obamacare on-line sign-up system.

Ted Cruz is an honorable man (so are they all, all honorable men), and so I'm going to assume that he just wants to find someone to split the cost of the U-Haul.