All Of A Piece

The Carpetbagger Report notices that "qualification" for a job doesn't really matter to the Bush Administration:

From Michael Chertoff, to Alberto Gonzales, to Treasury Secretary John Snow, to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, to Condoleezza Rice, to HHS Secretary Mike Leavit, the president has surrounded himself with people who have no experience in the areas in which they've been placed.

Well, of course qualification doesn't matter to the Bush Administration.  They've rejected the very idea of the possibility of subject-matter expertise.  That's one of the core themes of "The Post-Modern President" by Josh Marshall:  the substitution for fundamentalist ideology for fact-based expertise in tax policy, in economic policy, in environmental policy, in intelligence, in military decisions, in every area.  It's also one of the primary features of the Intelligent Design (née Creationist) attack on biology, and the generalized Republican attack on any scientific findings that interfere with their preferred political agenda.

And of course, we must not forget this:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

If you don't believe in the judicious study of discernable reality, you don't believe in the possibility of "qualification" for a job.  And so you revert to ideological purity, loyalty, and cronyism as the determining factors. 

This sort of thing has been done before.   I believe the consensus is that it was a dismal failure.

Update:  So Atrios has a partial list of the Bush Administration's wall of incompetence, and Kevin Drum is just boggled that Bush can't find competent appointees.  Atrios gets it, I think, but I keep wondering when Drum will stop with the wide-eyed ingenue routine and cop to the simple truth that the Bush people and the modern Republican Party just don't give a tinker's damn about actually governing.  It's not that they're too dumb or that every single one of them is incapable of competence (though there are clearly a lot of complete stumblebums with a lot of power in the party), it's that competence is entirely irrelevant to their practices, either with regard to policy or personnel.  They're operating with a completely different set of priorities.

Comments

[coturnix]

Exactly right! This is why Mooney's book is so important - it is not (just) about science. It is a horryfying reminder that reality means nothing to the mafia currently in charge. So, of course, there is no requirement for appointees to be any good at discerning reality.

[Charles2]

I think I've just had one of those "smack your forehead moments."

Mostly I'd fallen into the same sort of boggled mindset about the astonishingly inept way BushCo. governs as Kevin Drum, although perhaps a little less naive. Maybe. But I think you've hit it on the head with this post.

Thanks, I needed that.

[paperwight]

coturnix - thx.

C2 - The Republicans telegraph everything -- they say that they're going to do X and they believe Y. Then they do X and act as if they believe Y. Of course, that seems to be the cue for the "reasonable" punditocracy to stare at each other in befuddlement over the unexpected, inexplicable actions of the Republicans. I see this repeated over and over again. See, e.g., John Bolton.

1. Republicans say for roughly 30 years that they don't believe in the UN.
2. Republicans appoint someone to be the UN ambassador who would just as soon redevelop the land the UN HQ in NYC sits on.
3. Pundits and Democratic leadership are shocked.