Being chosen to serve in the Cabinet of the president of the United States, which houses the heads of the federal executive departments, puts you under a lot of scrutiny. In the past, candidates could be disqualified because they hired undocumented workers as nannies ( even when it wasn't against the law ), or for suggesting that "perhaps" schools should teach students about masturbation to combat the spread of AIDS , which got a Surgeon General in the 1990s fired. But that almost seems adorable in 2017, when we're faced with the kinds of candidates who appear so implausibly misinformed or downright villainous that they make Donald Trump's Cabinet seem more like the cabinet of Dr. Caligari . For example ...

5 Jeff Sessions, Trump's Attorney General Pick, Has Spent Decades Opposing Civil Rights

We don't know how much you've been paying attention to the news about Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (who is incidentally named after the Confederate president), but he's a man with few prejudices, provided you aren't a member of the black or LGBTQ community. But we're sure that wanting to undermine the civil rights of just about everyone he hasn't gone golfing with won't have a negative impact on him being Attorney General, the position for which Trump has tapped him.

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Also, his official Congressional photograph somehow looks like a fifth-grade yearbook photo.

When he was a district attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions prosecuted three people for the crime of dropping the absentee ballots of elderly black voters off at the post office, charging them with mail fraud and conspiracy, for which they faced over 100 years in prison. Clearly, he was trying to send a message to someone, and we're guessing that someone was "black people trying to vote in Alabama." During a confirmation hearing for his appointment to a Reagan judgeship, several people testified that he had made racist comments in front of them, including calling a black man "boy," declaring a white civil-rights lawyer a race traitor, and liberally using the n-word in private. The testimony ultimately kept him from a federal judgeship. That's right: He was too racist for 1980s Congress, but not for the 2017 White House.

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Quick, someone get Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney to do another duet.

Then there were his attempts to screw over poorly funded school districts (and the disabled children who attended them) in Alabama. After half a century of the state depriving children the right to a public education through unbalanced funding, a Circuit Court Judge deemed the practice unconstitutional and demanded a change. Sessions then spent most of his career as Alabama attorney general trying to discredit the judge, maintaining he was defending the State School Board (the School Board quickly declared that Sessions did not actually represent them or their views). Sessions continued the fight until the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the ruling and told Sessions to go away.