Welcome to the delightful world of Washington, D.C. realpolitik!
A third possibility is that he honestly believes his position is the correct one--or is holding out the possibility of returning to a .gov/.mil job in this or a future administration--and (a) is using the best arguments for his case, however weak or (b) is on a conference panel, not in a courtroom, and is aiming for entertaining one-liners rather than a point-by-point argument that you'd find in a legal brief or congressional testimony.
I didn't find his comments especially entertaining, and I don't think my sense of humour is faulty, so let's rule out the court jester theory.
That leaves "using the best arguments for the case he truly believes in, however weak". This I think would correctly fall under the umbrella of incompetence. At some point, rational people are supposed to evaluate their own arguments and change their beliefs if they can't sustain them anymore.
In this case he has strongly implied that "tech people" with a libertarian bent are naive and their beliefs crumble the moment they're faced with the real world. Insulting the people you need help from isn't a good start. But regardless, I don't know of any tech companies that have real problems complying with a robust, trustworthy process that includes many checks and balances to ensure only people widely agreed to be criminals get investigated. The whole problem has started because that system has broken down over time and post-Snowden been revealed as nothing more than a political sleight of hand.
It can't be called incompetence if he makes the arguments he has been paid (and likely will again be paid) to make. The world is full of highly competent people who do exactly that, many of them lawyers. They're not called 'advocates' for nothing.
But this begs the question why otherwise self-respecting panels so often give a soapbox to propagandists. Perhaps instead of using the mindless daily news formula of pitting two self-interested views against each other to see who has better soundbites we should try to put rational, thoughtful people on the stage.
That's not a third possibility, but rather saying it might be the first ( = he honestly believes this) or the second ( = he doesn't, but either pretends he does for personal gain or is just stringing words together because hey, it's not like it matters).
"Welcome to the delightful world of Washington, D.C. realpolitik!"
I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning.
Forget morality. I'm just talking about a sense that you're doing something worth doing at all.
I just couldn't do it. No matter how hard I tried, eventually the realization that what I was doing was meaningless backbiting bullshit would sink in and I'd blow my brains out.
Maybe it's the "secret to success in New York" joke. The joke goes that the secret is to be smart enough to play the game but not smart enough to figure the game out. My guess would be that applies to DC far more than NY.
>I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning.
That's one reason I decamped to the SF bay area. I have friends still living in DC (or one of its inner 'burbs) who have been saying for over a decade that they want to escape the games and backbiting bullshit, but have never managed to do so. One reason is the compensation can be high: the DC area is home to the highest-income county in the nation[1]. Stewart is a senior partner at Steptoe, where the average partner income is approx. $1M[2]; as a very senior one he might be taking home $2M a year.
Plus housing prices are cheaper than SF or the peninsula, and if you're trained as a political fixer/policy wonk, where else do you go?
On a more HN-relevant point, working in DC means trying to get a bigger slice of a fixed pie. Silicon Valley companies and other startups around the world can make the pie bigger. For more realpolitik, check out this provocative essay on DC-Silicon Valley by San Jose-based Cypress Semiconductor cofounder/CEO TJ Rodgers (it's worth a read even if you disagree, I think): http://www.cypress.com/?rID=34975
I agree with at least some of what TJ Rodgers has to say, though it's a tad too Randian for my taste.
Using cigarette taxes as an example highlights an intrinsic problem with libertarianism: sometimes government is our only defense against "softer" forms of power. Cigarettes are chemically addictive, so selling them means essentially using mind control to generate repeat customers.
Some libertarians want to be free to create value, but others want to be free to con people. Typical Randians like TJ Rodgers don't see the difference, or they grossly overestimate the ability of free human beings to defend themselves against determined and clever con artistry. Much con artistry, such as financial swindling, is very sophisticated when compared with something as ham-fisted as addictive drug pushing. If humans were good enough to resist that kind of thing, there'd be no jobs for stage magicians. Everyone would spot their tricks.
If I were in government and were doing government's proper job, I'd feel good about my work. My feeling though is that quite a bit of government and its related business orbit isn't doing anything like that.
A third possibility is that he honestly believes his position is the correct one--or is holding out the possibility of returning to a .gov/.mil job in this or a future administration--and (a) is using the best arguments for his case, however weak or (b) is on a conference panel, not in a courtroom, and is aiming for entertaining one-liners rather than a point-by-point argument that you'd find in a legal brief or congressional testimony.