What the Fuck Are We Doing Here, America?

When Saying the Wrong Thing Matters More Than Doing the Wrong Thing

We've reached a point where a senior national security official can accidentally include a journalist in a group chat about imminent military strikes, then attempt to evade responsibility with excuses so flimsy they wouldn't convince a middle school principal confronting a student about a prank text—and yet our national discourse remains fixated on whether a Democratic congresswoman's joke about “Governor Hot Wheels” crossed a line of decorum.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And there is something profoundly broken about a political culture that treats these two incidents as morally comparable.

The breathtaking incompetence displayed in the war plans leak represents a genuine national security crisis. Mike Waltz, supposedly one of our nation's top security officials, created a group chat discussing classified military operations and somehow included a journalist—then tried to blame it on some mysterious technical glitch rather than taking actual responsibility. “Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number?” he asked Laura Ingraham, who herself couldn't suppress her disbelief at the absurdity of the excuse.

This isn't merely embarrassing. It's dangerous. It's a level of staggering ineptitude that would be comedic if it weren't potentially lethal. It represents a catastrophic breakdown in basic operational security at the highest levels of government. And yet, it's competing for attention with outrage over a tasteless nickname.

In my last piece about the Crockett controversy, I discussed the moral asymmetry between rhetorical transgressions and substantive cruelty, and how selective outrage about civility often serves to protect power. But this new war plans fiasco throws our warped moral priorities into even sharper relief while revealing something far more disturbing: the constitutional guardrails, if they can be argued to be “holding” in any fashion, are showing advanced signs of fatigue and potential for catastrophic failure. No engineer would justly find this structure safe for occupancy.

We're witnessing a system in advanced decay. High-ranking officials are casually discussing war plans on encrypted messaging apps. Classified information is being handled with less care than a teenager's group chat about weekend plans. Basic protocols for national security operations are being ignored or misunderstood by the very people charged with maintaining them. And the response to this systemic breakdown? Technical excuses about contact mix-ups and partisan deflection.

This isn't just incompetence; it's structural failure. The constitutional architecture designed to prevent precisely this kind of dangerous behavior is buckling under the weight of institutional corruption and partisan loyalty. The checks and balances that should provide accountability are being short-circuited by a political culture more concerned with superficial norms of civility than with substantive norms of governance.

The pattern extends beyond these incidents. Susan Collins expresses being “extremely troubled” about officials texting war plans to a reporter—words that will almost certainly translate into zero concrete oversight actions. Congressional committees that should be launching immediate investigations are instead focused on partisan advantage. Media outlets that should be sounding five-alarm fires about national security breaches are treating it as just another day in Washington.

The same media ecosystem that breathlessly reports on both Crockett's rhetorical transgression and Waltz's security incompetence treats them as equivalent scandals, each worthy of their own news cycle, their own panel discussions, their own performative expressions of concern. This false equivalence serves power by flattening all moral considerations into a single undifferentiated plane where inept governance, dangerous incompetence, and tasteless jokes all merit the same level of outrage.

There exists a profound asymmetry between someone making an inappropriate joke and someone compromising national security through sheer incompetence. Words matter, but they don't matter equally in all contexts. The moral weight of an insult, however tasteless, simply cannot equal the moral weight of actions that put lives and institutional integrity at risk.

The fixation on Waltz's embarrassing security breach risks becoming just another partisan food fight rather than a serious examination of the dangerous systemic failures permeating our governance. The focus on whether he added the journalist deliberately or accidentally obscures the more fundamental question: why are high-ranking officials casually discussing imminent military operations in a group chat in the first place? What other basic protocols are being ignored? What other constitutional guardrails are crumbling while we argue about decorum?

The moral reckoning our moment demands isn't about policing language with equal vigor regardless of context. It's about recognizing which actions truly threaten democratic governance and security at scale. It's about maintaining a sense of proportion that doesn't equate a verbal jab with institutional decay. It's about refusing to allow superficial concerns about civility to eclipse existential concerns about constitutional function.

We can acknowledge that Crockett should have chosen her words more carefully without pretending that her verbal transgression exists on the same moral plane as the systemic breakdown displayed by Waltz and the administration he serves. We can hold a more complex moral position that recognizes both the value of civil discourse and the necessity of moral clarity about what truly threatens our collective welfare.

The crisis of our time isn't that our discourse has become too coarse. It's that we've lost the ability to distinguish between what offends our sensibilities and what endangers our constitutional order. It's that we've elevated the performance of concern above the substance of governance. It's that we've created a moral framework where saying the wrong thing is treated as equivalent to dismantling democratic safeguards—a framework that inevitably protects power at the expense of accountability.

So what the fuck are we doing here, America? We're confusing the map for the territory. We're mistaking the performance of governance for governance itself. We're allowing moral outrage to be directed by those who benefit most from misdirecting our attention. And until we recover the capacity to distinguish between verbal missteps and constitutional collapse, we'll continue asking this question while the structure that houses our democracy crumbles around us.

“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand Russell