A Cabinency of Dunces
Victor Davis Hanson May 26, 2022
As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after
crisis, debate rages whether President Joe Biden is incompetent,
mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his
success.
A second national discussion revolves around who actually is
overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Biden’s frequent
bewilderment and cognitive challenges.
But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s
Cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology
into catastrophic governance.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essenti-
ally nullified federal immigration law. More than 2 million foreign
nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit
and without COVID-19 vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.
Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law.
But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head
his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz—an
arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele
dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes.
While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced
her resignation, Mayorkas promises his board will carry on.
In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent
groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools.
In reaction and under prompts from teachers unions, Attorney Ge-
neral Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department
to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats”
from parents against school board members.
The FBI recently has been knee-deep in political controversies. It
illegally doctored a FISA application to entrap an American citizen.
Its former directors, under oath before Congress, either claimed
faulty memory or admitted lying to federal investigators.
The last thing a scandal-plagued FBI needed was to go undercover
at school board meetings to investigate parents worried over their
children’s education.
We are in a fuel price spiral that is destroying the middle class.
Yet when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about plans
to lower gas prices, she laughed off the idea as “hilarious.”
Later, Granholm preposterously claimed, “It is not the administra-
tion policies that have affected supply and demand.”
Apparently haranguing those who finance fossil-fuel production,
canceling the Keystone pipeline, suspending new federal oil and gas
leases, and stopping production in the Arctic National Wildlife Re-
fuge all had nothing to do with high fuel prices.
Currently, supply chain disruptions are paralyzing the U.S.
economy.
The huge Port of Los Angeles has been a mess for more than a year.
Since last fall, dozens of cargo ships have been backed up to the
horizon. Thousands of trucks are bottlenecked at the port.
During the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not
at work. Instead, at the height of the crisis, he took a two-month
paternity leave to help out his husband and two newborn babies.
Such paternal concern is a noble thing. But Buttigieg is supposed
to ensure that life-or-death supplies reach millions of strapped
Americans.
This winter, trains entering and leaving Los Angeles were routine-
ly looted in the Old West style of train robbing—without much of a
response from Buttigieg’s transportation bureau.
In Senate testimony, Secretary of the Interior Secretary Deb
Haaland refused to explain why her department is slow walking federal
oil and gas leases at a time when Americans are paying between $5 and
$6 a gallon for gas.
Haaland was unable to provide simple answers about when new leases
will result in more supplies of oil and gas. Her panicked aides slid
talking points to her, given that in deer-in-the-headlights fashion,
she seemed incapable of providing senators with basic information
about U.S. energy production on federal lands.
The United States is sending many billions of dollars' worth of
sophisticated weapons to Ukraine to combat Russian aggression. We
rightly claim it is not a proxy war against Russia, but instead an
effort to help stop a brutal Russian invasion.
Why then did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tell the world the
very opposite in a fashion that could only convince Russians that
our real aim in Ukraine is to destroy Russia as a superpower?
As Austin put it publicly, “We want to see Russia weakened to the
degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in
invading Ukraine.”
Even if that description of the agenda is true, why broadcast it,
given Russia has more than 6,000 nuclear weapons and its president,
Vladimir Putin, is increasingly erratic and paranoid?
The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological
rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.
They seem indifferent to the current border, inflation, energy,
and crime disasters. When confronted, they're unable to answer simple
questions from Congress, or they mock anyone asking for answers on
behalf of the strapped American people.
We don’t know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up run-
ning the government, only that they are here and the American people
are suffering from their presence.
****Victor Davis Hanson
Sadly this group of misfits seems to think that they are doing
something right regardless of the disaster they are creating.
Add to that a Vice President that has no clue of her duties and
the ones she has been given, she shirks them off. As the Border Czar
she has yet to even go there. SHe just cackles.
If the good Lord is graceful to us we will remove a large number
of these people along with many Representatives and Senators in the
upcoming midterms and the sane and ethical portion of DC can begin
to rescue the US from more damage.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 