YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SWAMP.

Yesterday I wondered if the secretary of defense going AWOL was simply the latest attempt by the Jarrett regency to rub our faces in their power.

Their senile sock puppet can't mumble his way through even a simple speech without revealing how far gone he is, and he can't follow simple stage directions once he's done scolding us.  All the vice president ever does is giggle on the late night shows.  Buckwheat gets a thick binder of deflections and obfuscations, and all she has to do is roll her eyes and look exasperated.

It transpires that Mr Austin was hors de combat thanks to prostate cancer treatment and complications therefrom.  Let me take this opportunity to wish him a full recovery and a long and healthy retirement.  Slate's Fred Kaplan recommends that course of action.  "Austin has a distinguished military record, but he has broken national-security protocol, violated the public trust, and fallen far short of any president’s expectations of a Cabinet secretary’s behavior. He should go."

Indeed so, although among the fallout from the episode, which goes far beyond the usual suspects seizing and pouncing, comes a reminder from Ed Driscoll that there's a pattern Matthew Continetti picked up two years ago.

No conspiracy is required to explain the ineptitude. This is Joe Biden we are talking about.

Lately, though, I have been having second thoughts. Not that Barack Obama or Ron Klain or Dr. Jill are running the show in secret. What I have been wondering, instead, is whether anyone is leading the government at all. There is no power, either overt or covert, in or behind the throne. The throne is empty.

Think of the economy, the border, and Ukraine. From time to time, Biden addresses these issues. He may even answer questions about them. The White House sends out press releases describing its latest initiatives. Vice President Harris or the second gentleman pops up somewhere to talk about all the good she and he are doing.

Yet each of these elements—the president, his staff, his spokesperson, his vice president, his policy—comes across as disconnected, discombobulated, as if each inhabits a separate sphere of activity. Whether because of Biden's age, or his weekend trips to Delaware, or years of remote work, or lower-level staff turnover, or a painstakingly slow decision-making process, or ideological stubbornness, or a lack of a strategic plan, this administration drifts from crisis to crisis, and from one bad headline to the next. And nothing improves.

It's the unelected bureaucrats, the same crowd that squeals about threats to democracy or a potential dictatorship each time Donald Trump proposes to make more federal agency jobs at-will-of-the-president jobs.  What's protecting us from the worst instincts of the Jarrett regency is a principal-agent problem.  Those bureaucrats might generally agree with what Democrats want to do, but they also have their individual interests to protect.

But when you've lost Politico?  "Biden and his team have portrayed themselves as the adults in the room after the chaos and high turnover of the Trump administration. But the disorganization at the Pentagon has undermined that narrative."  Sorry, that narrative was nonsense long ago.  Before the secretary of defense went AWOL, the secretary of transportation took time off to accept delivery of two babies from surrogate moms.  The secretary of homeland security now dares Congress to impeach and remove him by threatening that his successor will be worse.  No, his successor will also be a figurehead.  We are being governed, to borrow from P. J. O'Rourke, by a bad dorm-room bull session, while the vapidity of the leadership is as clear for all to see now as it was in the Chernenko era Soviet Union.

Let the pile-on commence.

Yes, maybe Secretary Austin is far from essential but what about President Biden?  Is he calling the shots or up to speed?

Beyond office politics, this is an embarrassment for the country and for a president who looks more detached every time he goes public.

Gross incompetence, indeed. Imagine 144 GS-11 and up queuing at the cafeteria, before they draft the talking points for Buckwheat's binder.  And, unlike the general manager of a baseball team, "full confidence" is not the first warning that the manager is gone.

The White House, naturally, immediately made clear its "complete trust and confidence in Secretary Austin."

In fairness, once someone has presided over the pullout of Afghanistan without getting fired, it's hard to cashier him for anything short of losing some other country in humiliating fashion.

This fiasco could simply be Austin's own unbelievable personal lapse. But it's hard not to see the controversy in the context of an administration that when it comes to national security cares as much about fashionable ideological fixations — from DEI to the climate — as the essentials involved in maintaining a highly capable war-fighting machine.

And the most important lack of transparency about health is happening before our eyes. It doesn't involve any cabinet official but the commander in chief himself.

We are told that Joe Biden is robust and energetic when he is increasingly rickety and, seemingly, easily confused.

We can be sure if the president gets worse, the White House — adopting the Austin policy — will do everything in its power to hide the ball.

Meanwhile, we've conducted a real-time experiment regarding Biden foreign policy. With a war on in Gaza and Iranian proxies attacking US interests throughout the Middle East, the secretary of defense disappeared, and it didn't matter.

Bureaucratic inertia, for better or worse, is like that.  I suspect that would be as true if a vigorous president with a persuasive public manner was at work.  "Embattled Americans should take it as the latest evidence that Joe Biden, a waxworks effigy of a president in Conrad Black’s phrase, is not really running the country."

After we've tried everything else, will we try rolling back the administrative state and confining the federal government to its enumerated and defined powers?