Identity Politics Is Not A Viable Substitute For Competence

Friday’s RVIVR post about CNN and its pre-emptive shot at the National Bureau of Economic Research – along the lines that all eight of its board members are white people, and those are the folks who’ll decide whether we’re in a recession, and it isn’t fair that the honkies get to do that math – appeared at The American Spectator earlier today.

There’s a part of that piece which deserves a quick recounting, because we’re seeing a major theme here…

What’s important to Americans right now? Competence. We desperately need people who can do a good job in their professions. But we have a massive shortage of that, along with virtually everything else.

Disney gives Bob Chapek, who has cut the value of that company’s stock in half, a new contract immediately after his executives’ political activism costs it $200 million a year in favorable tax treatment from the state of Florida and it released a box office fizzle in Buzz Lightyear with the stupid and useless virtue-signal of a lesbian kiss in a movie for four-year-olds. Ketanji Brown Jackson, who can’t define what a woman is because she says she’s not a biologist, is sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice. A loudmouthed idiot in the Biden administration squawks that our economic pain needs to continue so we can save the “liberal world order,” as though (1) the two are at all necessarily related and (2) anybody in America gives a damn about world orders.

Our military is getting rid of unvaccinated troops and officers while missing its recruitment targets by 60 percent and has lowered its intake standards basically to nothing. It runs recruitment ads featuring fat lesbians and puts out press releases preening about abortions in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

Competence is at a premium in the country. Why? Because the people who have taken control of our institutions – cultural, business, political – aren’t competent.

And the White House is almost completely devoid of competence. It’s governed almost completely by people chosen based on their identity rather than their accomplishments.

Kamala Harris is the perfect embodiment of this. Consider that Joe Biden, the man at the top of the ticket, has never been a competent politician – if he was, he wouldn’t have to pirate the speeches of better, smarter men like Neil Kinnock and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., during his failed presidential bids earlier in life before his cognition went underwater. Given Biden’s diminished capacity at his advanced age, it was imperative to find somebody to serve as his Vice President who could actually lead when Biden couldn’t.

Instead, because Team Biden insisted on pairing him with a black female, Harris was chosen. She has no accomplishments to speak of. Her political rise is wholly attributable to a long-running extramarital sexual relationship with California political fixer and kingmaker Willie Brown, who kept using his influence to move her up in that state’s Democrat-dominated politics. But Kamala Harris isn’t capable of leading anyone, and certainly not the United States of America.

We’ve had Vice Presidents who weren’t particularly inspiring figures. Dan Quayle, Walter Mondale and Al Gore come to mind. So does Joe Biden, for that matter. But none of those guys ever sounded like this…

As you know, this isn’t an outlier where Harris is concerned. It’s standard. You’ve seen this sort of thing time and again from her.

It isn’t like Harris is the only member of this administration whose primary qualification was that she checked a number of identity boxes. It isn’t like “Rachel” Levine, who had killed thousands of senior citizens by placing COVID patients in nursing homes in Pennsylvania, was hired as one of the DHHS’ top bureaucrats for any reason other than that Team Biden wanted a transgender individual in a prominent position.

Or Pete Buttigieg.

A sparkling example of just how far this goes is Karine Jean-Pierre, the black gay female White House press secretary who took over when Jen Psaki left to become a screeching MSNBC host. It’s patently obvious that Jean-Pierre is a “diversity hire” who has the added benefit of being the significant other of CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux; the ruling elite gets to replicate itself while checking off those identity boxes.

The problem is Jean-Pierre is an abject disaster in her job, so much so that POLITICO just noticed and sent up an article all about that fact…

It’s been a rocky first month for White House press secretary KARINE JEAN-PIERRE.

Her answers have baffled reporters, and even made some of her White House colleagues wince. She has increasingly found herself sharing the podium or splitting briefings with JOHN KIRBY, who has been taking the leadon foreign policy and at times appears to function as a co-press secretary.

And Republicans have zeroed in on her as a useful punching bag.

Jean-Pierre officially took the podium in May, becoming the first Black and openly LGBTQ woman to hold a position long dominated by white men and women. She signed on as the administration faced a national infant formula shortage, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, soaring inflation and high gas prices, the ongoing war in Ukraine, gun violence, and bad poll numbers for the president.

Against such a difficult backdrop, her stumbles in several instances have made her appear underprepared — in moments quickly weaponized by the right.

She was unaware that Interior Secretary DEB HAALAND had tested positive for Covid and didn’t know Biden had been with Haaland two days before at a Memorial Day event. “Oh, were they?” she said, to which the reporter pointedly noted pictures of the pair.

And when asked that day about the president telling Naval Academy graduates that he had been appointed to the academy in 1965 — a claim met with skepticism — Jean Pierre said: “I didn’t hear that part of the speech.”

The POLITICO piece has all kinds of excuses for Jean-Pierre’s incompetence, this being the worst of them…

Some Black communications officials in and outside the administration, along with allies of Jean-Pierre, feel White House leadership has set her up to fail by having Kirby, a white man who was in the running for her job, hovering nearby and taking the lead on foreign policy.

Jean-Pierre’s job has also been made more difficult because the White House has yet to name a principal deputy press secretary, the job she previously held. One person with knowledge about the discussions told West Wing Playbook that the White House has considered an outside Democratic comms official for the role, though an administration official noted the Biden White House has a policy of considering outside candidates for every role in a bid to increase diversity.

This same excuse was made for Harris’ blithering incompetence – that somehow she wasn’t properly mentored and that’s why she’s failing.

Well, in the case of both Harris and Jean-Pierre, they were having sex with somebody prominent and that played a role in getting where they’ve gotten, so maybe it’s correct that they’re not properly mentored. In organizations where merit and competence is important, your identity and who you sleep with are never considered as qualifications for moving up.

But what we get from Team Biden and the Democrat Party as a whole is not just the opposite of a meritocracy, but actual virtue-signaling about its anti-competence. One last quote from the POLITICO story…

A Democratic congressional source told West Wing Playbook that the press secretary regularly solicits advice and counsel from Democrats across Washington, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

“She brings to the Brady Briefing Room a unique perspective that is important in helping to shape and tell the story of this President and his administration,” said the CBC chairwoman, Rep. JOYCE BEATTY, (D-Ohio), in a statement.

Think about that for a moment. Somehow it’s a feather in Karine Jean-Pierre’s cap that she solicits advice on doing her job in front of the American people, most of whom have decided the administration she works for is garbage, from the Congressional Black Caucus – which is made up of people from safe, gerrymandered Democrat districts that sit as extreme outliers in American politics.

Exactly what informed perspective do you think Sheila Jackson Lee, Hank Johnson and Maxine Waters can give you in reversing the fact that Biden is sitting underwater 37-47 with Hispanic voters in the latest CIVIQS approval poll? Or that he’s underwater 24-66 with white voters?

But that’s who Jean-Pierre is consulting with. And why do you think that is?

Because they tell her she’s doing great, and anybody who doesn’t appreciate her is RACIST.

The wages that mentality, endemic to Team Biden and the Democrat Party as a whole (here’s another example), is paying can be seen everywhere. Shortages of basic items, an inverted bond yield curve, inflation through the roof, an energy crisis, a failing air travel industry…the dysfunction is in every place you look.

The cities are Third World places. Idiocy and failure are expected. Harris was in New Orleans addressing the Essence Festival, and the organizers misspelled “Louisiana” on the backdrop behind her. Somehow that backdrop passed muster before the Vice President came on stage. But that’s just par for the course with this crowd.

America isn’t going to put up with it. A change is coming. This can’t sustain.