Leadership by the unqualified

I'm going to ask a question that will undoubtedly be uncomfortable for the 33% of Americans who are still in support of what our current administration is doing:

Why are you content to have people in jobs for which they are manifestly unqualified, and about which they display nothing short of catastrophic ignorance?

Surprisingly, I'm not talking here about Trump himself, although I'd argue that those charges could just as easily be levied against him.  The fish rots from the head on down, as the saying goes.  But here I'm referring to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who was interviewed by Lesley Stahl a few days ago on 60 Minutes, the results of which are nearly unwatchable, if you (like me) hate seeing someone completely humiliating themselves in public.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's especially appalling about this interview is that Stahl was not trying to nail DeVos to the wall.  In fact, some of her questions strike me as softball.  And DeVos still couldn't give a coherent answer.  As an example, Stahl asked her if, under her leadership, schools in her home state of Michigan had gotten better.  After all, she allegedly got the nomination from Trump because of her work promoting charter schools there, so her influence in Michigan far predates her appointment to the Department of Education.  Here's her answer:

I don't know.  Overall, I -- I can't say overall that they have all gotten better.  There are certainly lots of pockets where the students are doing well.  Michigan schools need to do better.  There is no doubt about it...  I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.

"I don't know?"  The Secretary of the Department of Education is asked about the current status of schools in her home state, and she says, "I don't know?"  For one thing, how can she have gone into this interview not having at least prepared an answer for this question?  I mean, if there's an expression that means the opposite of "out of left field," that's what this question was.

And she can't talk about schools in general, because they're "made up of individual students attending them?"  What the hell does this even mean?

But those were far from the only problems.  When Stahl asked her if she'd visited any underperforming schools, DeVos answered with a flat no.  Stahl, whose cool, collected persona slipped, betraying a moment of pure astonishment, said, "Maybe you should."

DeVos looked confused, and echoed, "Maybe I should."

Then DeVos tried a salvo of her own.  "The federal government has invested billions and billions and billions of dollars in the educational system," DeVos said, "and we have seen zero results."  Stahl, who unlike DeVos had actually done her homework, said that this wasn't true -- that test scores over the past 25 years had risen steadily.

DeVos gave her a walleyed stare for a few seconds, and said, "What can be done about that is empowering parents to make the choices for their kids.  Any family that has the economic means and the power to make choices is doing so for their children."

"What can be done about that?"  What can be done about what?  Rising test scores?  Heaven knows, we can't have that.  And what on earth did that non-answer have to do with the question Stahl asked?

And on and on it went.  I honestly at some point had my hands over my eyes because I couldn't bear to watch.  But after the video clip was done, and I had recovered from being that long in a state of wince, I started to get mad.  How is this woman qualified to run the Department of Education?  My sense is that she would be out of her depth in a kiddie pool, and the sole reason she is in the position is that she is a multi-millionaire plutocrat who donated to Donald Trump's election campaign.

So, to the conservatives who've read this far: how can you accept this?  This honestly has nothing to do with party.  Betsy DeVos would be drastically unqualified regardless what her political leanings were.  But there she sits, on the Cabinet of the United States, and she does a public interview in which she comes across as a blithering idiot...

... and not a single Republican leader has anything to say about it.

C'mon, people.  At some point sound leadership has to outweigh party affiliation.  It is ridiculous that our country's educational system -- our hope for the future -- is being run by a woman who, in my grandmother's words, "don't have the brains that God gave gravy."

And these sorts of things keep happening, and over and over, not one damn thing is done about it.  All I can say is, I hope that in November, people will remember this and vote out the kiss-ass rubber stampers who are giving Trump and his rich cronies a bye on everything from appointing nitwits to canoodling with porn stars.

Stopping Marie Curie

I have a simple request.  Can we stop electing morons to public office?

As you might expect, this comment arises because of Louie Gohmert, the Texas representative who has been elected to five consecutive terms despite having only recently mastered the ability to walk without dragging his knuckles on the ground.

Gohmert, you might recall, is the one who said the military's function is to "kick rears, break things, and come home."  He's also the one who took a highly humiliating trip to Egypt (humiliating to the rest of America, although probably not to him, given that you have to have an IQ that exceeds your hat size in order to experience humiliation), in which he and Michele Bachmann made a highly condescending speech in which, amongst other things, they implied that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was responsible for 9/11.

Representative Louie Gohmert [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, Gohmert has beat all previous stupidity records by throwing sexism into the mix.  He was one of four representatives who voted against a bill authorizing the National Science Foundation to utilize funds to recruit women into scientific fields.  When asked why he had voted against the measure, here was his response:

This program is designed to discriminate against that young, poverty-stricken boy and to encourage the girl.  Forget the boy.  Encourage the girl. 

It just seems that, if we are ever going to get to the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., that he spoke just down the Mall, he wanted people to be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.  I know after race has been an issue that needed attention, then gender appropriately got attention. 

But the point is that those things are not supposed to matter. 

It just seems like, when we come in and we say that it is important that for a while we discriminate, we end up getting behind.  And then probably 25 years from now boys are going to have fallen behind in numbers, and then we are going to need to come in and say: Actually, when we passed that bill forcing encouragement of girls and not encouraging of little boys, we were getting behind the eight ball.  We didn’t see that we were going to be leaving little boys in the ditch, and now we need to start doing programs to encourage little boys.

So here is a person who is so steeped in white male privilege that he honestly doesn't get the toll that has been taken on women and minorities by systematic institutional prejudice.  One and all, the people who cry "overreach of political correctness" are themselves privileged -- and don't know what it's like to deal with, every single hour of every single day, others denying you access based on your gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.  They do not understand what it's like to have doors closed to you because of factors that you can't change (and in a fair society, wouldn't want to).

Yes, I know, I'm a heterosexual privileged white male myself.  The difference is that I know I don't know these things.  I'm not blowing hot air pretending that I have any perspective at all.

Gohmert, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be smart enough to recognize his ignorance.  In fact, he went on to say that it's a good thing that such a program didn't exist in Marie Curie's time:

I thank God that there wasn’t a program like this that distracted her.  But according to the bill that we passed today, we are requiring the Science Foundation to encourage entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.  Thank God that is not what Madame Curie did.

If you have any doubt about how the brilliant minds of women like Marie Curie, Hilde Mangold, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Barbara McClintock, and Rosalind Franklin would have benefited from a program like this, read about their lives, and the struggles that they faced simply having anyone in the field take them seriously.  Consider how much more they could have accomplished if the majority of their time hadn't been spent in proving that their credibility, competence, and intelligence had nothing to do with which sex organs they born with.

Gohmert's comments are a profound insult to women everywhere, and to their allies who at least partly understand how sexism still permeates our culture.  Unfortunately, though, I suspect that if such ugly willful ignorance hasn't caused him to lose the election the last five times, it probably won't make any difference in the next one.

Still, one can keep hoping.