A Culture of Incompetence

Obama’s left never accepts responsibility for anything. Weaned on the sour milk of thuggish, tenured academicians and marinated in the surreal stew of lawyer-land, the odd creatures that infest our White House have no notion of work or honor or duty. This manifests itself in different ways. Mendacity has been elevated almost to a secular religion. Obama, his officials, his armies of minor minions prevaricate with such aplomb that one wonders if they truly know when they are lying or telling the truth. The disgraceful trail of obfuscations, dissimulations, and quarter-truths are invariably defended by the administration’s flacks with the mantra “we have seen no evidence.” Of course we have not! The evidence has been destroyed or hidden or lied about.

Politicians lie, of course, and have as long as government has been around, but the sheer audacity of fabrications (the video that “caused” the Benghazi attack) rise to the level of Orwellian thought control, compounded by the utter indifference of the establishment media to calling out these lies. Profound isolation from the governed is also a hallmark of our pathetic president and his hapless helpers. How could Obama, with a straight face, adopt Reagan’s “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” line and assume that ordinary folk would yip for joy? But the starkest manifestation is the culture of incompetence that pervades everything surrounding Obama and his friends. The botched rollout of Obamacare, for example, led naturally to more noisy activity and more hilarious promises – but these are precisely the sorts of things Obama considers real work. The hideous crimes of the Veterans Administration, carbuncles that even candidate Obama noted when he ran for president, suit him better unchanged, because that allows him to claim future victories against malfeasance and maliciousness in the VA. Obama and the left desperately need intolerable incompetence to infest every crevice of American life. When things work well, who needs these people? This is transparently clear and well understood, at least by sensible people, but a more opaque truth is the nasty fact that when leftists produce competent and honest governance, the demand for leftists drops just as much. Pain, misery, despair, confusion, hopelessness, and fear are the only sustenance of leftists. All but the most diabolical leftists refuse to chant the old black magic of Bolshevism. And here are the precise linguistic formulations of those Marxist spells: “The worse, the better” and “The more innocent, the more guilty.” So Obama and his cabal instead graciously embrace a slovenly, casual, and dismissive incompetence. They plow, they seed, and they sow a culture of incompetence. Obama has surrounded himself with the most breathtakingly banal and ignorant and dull-witted caste of retainers of any president in our nation’s history. His own utter lack of any executive experience – or, indeed, any experience at all in any productive work for which he could be held accountable by anyone – simply blesses the inevitable incompetence, errors, idiocies, and boneheaded blunders that seem to follow every step he takes. The Frankenstein quilt-work of his presidency, a haphazard glop of minor disasters and serial deceptions, has now become a true monster. As Prime Minister Netanyahu has tried to tell him, a nuclear Iran may mean our end, or at least great cities in radioactive smolders. As doctors have doubtless told him privately, pandemics can slaughter huge chunks of mankind and dissolve civilization. As even a Democrat stalwart like Panetta seems to have told him, radical Islam on the march is another world war. His frantic Democrats may even now be trying to end his sleepwalking, at least in time to preserve their chance at electing his successor. Surely none of this really matters to him at all. The worship of failure, the culture of incompetence, is deeply rooted in the sort of transcendent nihilism that is the lightless soul of leftism today. Obama is simply its present avatar.