Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up. On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of so

Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up. On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it's great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that's not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future. Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.