Giving incompetence a chance

One of the most common things that has been said to me by Trump supporters is "give him a chance to govern."  And although I've been pretty vocal in my criticism of the President-elect, his rhetoric, and his decisions, no one would be happier than me if the prognostications of doom I'm hearing don't come true.  After all, the health of our democracy, our standing in the world, and the long-term survivability of the planet is far more important than any schadenfreude I would get from seeing someone I don't like fail.

But as far as giving people a chance, there are times when what a person says or does makes me disinclined to put them in the position of being able to do worse -- or simply to follow through on what they've already said.  I'm under no obligation to "give a chance" to someone who has shown no sign of competence.

Which brings me to Betsy DeVos.

I was appalled enough when she was first nominated for the position of Secretary of Education.  DeVos is a multi-millionaire whose staunch support of vouchers and charter schools in her home state of Michigan has been, by and large, an abysmal failure.  In an article written last month for the Detroit Free Press, Stephen Henderson has outlined the results -- a weakened public school system, and a host of charter schools whose lack of oversight has generated year after year of failure.  (One of them, Hope Academy of Grand River and Livernois, scored in the first percentile for academic performance in 2013 -- and despite of that, two years later had its charter renewed.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I still held out a modicum of hope that her confirmation hearing would show that she wasn't as bad as she seemed.  That hope, unfortunately, was destined to be dashed.  Her testimony at the hearing was a rambling, disjointed birdwalk that at times left me thinking, "What did she just say?"  She showed herself to be unprepared -- no, worse, she showed herself to be entirely incompetent.  As an example, she revealed during questioning that she didn't know the difference between academic proficiency and academic growth, terms that any first-year teacher would know.

As should the Secretary of Education.

It'd be nice to think this was just a stumble.  We all do that sometimes -- choke on something we should have known, or do know, and afterwards think, "Wow, I sure screwed that up."  But the entire hearing was full of "stumbles" like this.  When Virginia Senator Tim Kaine asked her if she supported compliance with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act as a requirement for receiving federal funding, she replied, "I think that's a matter best left to the states."

So wait a moment.  It's up to the states to determine if they'll follow a federal law?  One that mandates equal access to facilities and services for all students, regardless of disabilities?

That response, however, became a refrain.  On a question regarding guns in schools asked by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, she once again said, "I think that's best left for states and locales to decide."  Allow me to point out that Murphy represents the district in Connecticut where the Sandy Hook massacre took place.  When he understandably responded with incredulity, DeVos went into a bizarre description of how she knows of a school in Wyoming where they keep a gun to protect students from "potential grizzlies."

The response was so weird that #PotentialGrizzlies trended on Twitter for hours afterward.

Most of her testimony was a rather clumsy dance to avoid answering questions directly.  When given a long list of statistics regarding the failure of schools in Detroit, she responded that she thought Detroit schools were actually doing quite well.  Asked about her stance on science education, apropos of the teaching of evolution and climate change, she said, "I support the teaching of great science."

Well, forgive me for being a little dubious on that point, given DeVos's history of supporting groups like Focus on the Family and the Foundation for Traditional Values, both of which have worked tirelessly to eliminate the teaching of evolution in public schools.  Not to mention her own words, "Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's kingdom."

The supporters of the President-elect are saying, "Give her a chance."  Well, you know what?  I am under no obligation to "give a chance" to a person who has shown herself to be wildly unqualified for the job she's been nominated for.

Imagine if this was the approach taken in business.  A CEO interviews a candidate for a job, and the prospective employee refuses to give direct answers to questions, and in general shows himself to be a terrible choice for the job.  If the CEO didn't hire him, would you tell him, "You should have given him a chance?"

Worse still is the realization that the "chance" we're being asked to take here is to risk the education of millions of children.  We have no option at this point but to give Donald Trump a chance; after today, he'll be the president whether we like it or not.  We are not, however, required to give a chance to his incompetent nominees.

That's why we have confirmation hearings.

Moving past the facts

Because we all need something more to be pessimistic about regarding the incoming administration's choices for leadership roles, we have: a nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services of an anti-LGBT ideologue who sided with BP when the Deepwater Horizon well blew out, fouling the Gulf of Mexico with 210 million gallons of crude oil.  He referred to the White House's drive to secure funds to recompense businesses and homeowners whose property was damaged by the spill a "Chicago-style political shakedown."  Worse still, considering the job he's been nominated for, he belongs to a group that is not only virulently anti-vaxx, but believes that President Obama used hypnosis and mind-control techniques to win the 2008 and 2012 elections.

It's hard to imagine a worse choice for HHS than Tom Price.  (Yes, I know, I've been saying that sort of thing a lot lately.  Each time I think, "Okay, that's the worst choice I've heard yet," the bar keeps getting raised.)  Dana Liebelson of Huffington Post writes:

Over the years, Price co-sponsored a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.  He voted against a bill that banned employers from discriminating against gay people and a bill that fought anti-gay hate crimes.  He called the Obama administration’s guidelines allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, “absurd.” 

Price went out of his way to back Kelvin Cochran, an Atlanta fire chief who was terminated in January 2015 after employees received copies of his self-published book, which equated homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality.  The city’s mayor claimed Cochran was fired for his “judgment and management.”  But Price, along with five other Georgia lawmakers, signed onto a letter asking the mayor to reinstate him.

Price belongs to the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, which sounds pretty innocuous, but is a fringe group whose beliefs border on lunacy.  Over at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer writes:

Yet despite the lab coats and the official-sounding name, the docs of the AAPS are hardly part of mainstream medical society.  Think Glenn Beck with an MD.  The group (which did not return calls for comment for this story) has been around since 1943.  Some of its former leaders were John Birchers, and its political philosophy comes straight out of Ayn Rand.  Its general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, son of the legendary conservative activist Phyllis.  The AAPS statement of principles declares that it is “evil” and “immoral” for physicians to participate in Medicare and Medicaid, and its journal is a repository for quackery.  Its website features claims that tobacco taxes harm public health and electronic medical records are a form of “data control” like that employed by the East German secret police.  An article on the AAPS website speculated that Barack Obama may have won the presidency by hypnotizing voters, especially cohorts known to be susceptible to “neurolinguistic programming”—that is, according to the writer, young people, educated people, and possibly Jews.

Of course, I suppose this is the kind of thing you get when you have a President-elect whose spokespeople think -- and this is close to a direct quote -- "there's no such thing as facts."  Trump spokesperson Scottie Nell Hughes, who appeared three days ago on the Diane Rehm Show, made the following astonishing statement when asked about the President-elect's penchant for making statements that are outright lies (and I'm including her entire statement, so you can see that I didn't take it out of context):

Well, I think it’s also an idea of an opinion.  And that’s — on one hand I hear half the media saying that these are lies, but on the other half there are many people that go, no, it’s true.  And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts. 

There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.  And so Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth.  When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up.  Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.

No.  No, no, no.  For fuck's sake, there are facts, and they matter.  When Trump claims that there were "millions of illegal votes" that cost him the popular vote, it is simply untrue.  So are his statements that there was "serious voter fraud" in Virginia, California, and New Hampshire -- coincidentally, all states where he lost.  So was his claim that President Obama "screamed at a protester" at a Clinton rally.  So was his claim that "14% of resident non-citizens are registered to vote."  So was his statement that under Hillary Clinton, the State Department had six billion dollars "lost or stolen."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

These are not ideas or opinions.  These are statements that are demonstrably false, and that since he continues to defend them even after they were debunked, are actual outright lies.  Despite what Ms. Hughes claims, there is no such thing as a statement that is truth for "a large part of the population" and false for the rest of us.

The problem is, once you start to doubt the facts -- hell, to doubt that facts exist -- you can be convinced of literally anything.  You are set up to fall for any sufficiently convincing demagogue who makes statements that "seem reasonable," by which I mean "conform to your preconceived notions."  You are set up to buy that vaccines don't work, that LGBT individuals are more likely to be pedophiles, that Obama hypnotized people into voting for him, and that the people who live along the Gulf Coast deserve to pay for the damage of an oil spill from a multi-million dollar petroleum corporation out of their own pockets.

You are also, apparently, set up to believe that a candidate whose platform was "Drain the Swamp" is still living up to his word when every single leadership appointee he picks is either a donor or an establishment insider -- for example, the wife of a prominent conservative senator (Secretary of Transportation), a hedge fund manager for Goldman-Sachs (Secretary of the Treasury), a billionaire investor nicknamed "the king of bankruptcy" (Secretary of Commerce), a long-time senator with distinct racist leanings (Attorney General), and a pro-privatization multi-millionaire with zero experience (Secretary of Education).

The whole thing is profoundly terrifying, mostly because it's so hard to combat.  Once you've adopted this viewpoint -- that facts don't matter, or that facts are what you say they are -- you're stuck, and no amount of evidence will persuade you.  And after that, scary things can happen.  As Voltaire put it: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

The tour guide in CrazyTown

I'm being driven to the conclusion that Ben Carson is insane.

This has very little to do with his stance on actual issues.  From what I've heard, when he sticks to talking about policy, there's not much to distinguish him from the other candidates for the Republican nomination.  But as soon as he veers off script, Carson very quickly ends up leading us on a guided tour of CrazyTown.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with his comment earlier this year that there's no such thing as a war crime. "There is no such thing as a politically correct war," Carson said, in an interview on Fox News.  "We need to grow up, we need to mature.  If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war.  Other than that, we have to win."

You have to wonder if he thinks the Nuremberg Trials were justified.  After all, the Nazis didn't have to fight a politically correct war, right?  They were just trying to win.

Then we have his dire claims about Obamacare, which ring a little hollow after a Rand Corporation study done earlier this year that found that 17 million more Americans have health insurance since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

But no reason to let a little thing like facts get in the way.  Obamacare is the "worst thing since slavery" (direct quote, there), Carson told us on one occasion.  On another, he said that the ACA "has been even more damaging to the United States than the terrorist attacks of 9/11."  When the aghast interviewer asked him to elaborate, Carson said, "Things that are isolated issues as opposed to things that fundamentally change the United States of America and shift power from the people to the government.  That is a huge shift.”

Then we have his comments that the events that occurred in Nazi Germany could happen right here in the United States -- which is actually sensible until you put it in juxtaposition with some of his other statements.  At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Carson said that some people believed that the rise of something like Nazism would never happen in the USA.

"I beg to differ," Carson said.  "If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech...  If people don't speak up for what they believe, then other people will change things without them having a voice.  Hitler changed things there and nobody protested.  Nobody provided any opposition to him."

Hitler also swayed a lot of Germans by convincing them that they were at risk of losing their cultural identity from such threats as the Jews.  Kind of curious, then, that Carson is employing the same kinds of tactics, but aimed instead at gays -- whom he said were responsible for the fall of Rome:

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, he may not be all that sure of his own facts, because he said at another time that political correctness was what destroyed the Roman Empire:

You know, there is no society that can long survive without values and principles.  And if we get so caught up in political correctness, that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, then we go the same route as Ancient Rome.  They did exactly the same thing.  And they forgot who they were.  They stood for nothing and they fell for everything and they went right down the tubes.

So the fall of Rome couldn't have had anything to do with mismanagement by crazy leaders and their being attacked by a shitload of barbarians?

I can understand why Carson wouldn't want to draw attention to the former, at least.

The whole thing may be a moot point anyhow, because Carson went on record as saying that there "may be so much anarchy going on" in 2016 that the elections will be cancelled.

I'm willing to believe that a lot of the candidates, on both sides of the aisle, are pandering to their voter base, and saying whatever it takes to get elected.  When you look at campaign statements, and then what the victors actually do once they're in office, it becomes pretty clear that there's often a pretty big disconnect between the stump-speech rhetoric and the reality of policymaking.

Carson, though... when he speaks, in that soft, patient, utterly reasonable tone of his... I think he honestly believes everything he's saying.

Which makes his position as a frontrunner for the Republican nomination absolutely terrifying.  If this man gets the nod, and has even a prayer of a chance of winning the presidency...  well, let me just say that there are precedents in world history for insane but charismatic ideologues taking control of a country -- and none of them end well.