It occurred to me re-reading my critique of U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor — by her own description the ultimate affirmative action judge — that Barack Obama is the quintessential affirmative action president. His intention is to fill the government with affirmative action personnel, even while gathering more power for them to wield.

There was a time when our leadership was populated by the best and the brightest. No more. Now leadership positions are awarded for social reasons. People graduated from high school for social reasons, who graduated college with grades reflecting social needs rather than achievement. Entire careers are built upon the needs of society not the expertise of the individual.

People are placed in government positions high and low who are not qualified, who are not sharp, and who have difficulty discharging the duties of their office competently.

Print this story Email this story Post a Comment ADVERTISEMENT

Admittedly, there are positions for people like this, but the higher the positions, the more the nation has to lose from incompetent and over-advanced officeholders.

Thus President Obama appointed a science advisor who is so clearly insane he makes Dr. Strangelove look like a Boy Scout. He is proposing a judge who has difficulty with common English words. He has nominated a woman who would become the nation’s first obese surgeon general. What examples! 

We can only wait with trepidation as he assigns increasing power to people who have never held power before and might be tempted to abuse it; to people who are simply not qualified. I hope they will grow into their positions. Most of them exemplify the failure of American public education over the last four or five decades.

The government has become the primary job market for people such as this because only the government can afford to hire and advance people for social reasons. The government has the luxury of tolerating misfeasance and malfeasance. Private businesses need every employee to perform up to accepted industry standards or better.

Just as we have dumbed-down our schools, it was inevitable that affirmative-action personnel would eventually take their places throughout society, producing a dumbed-down society.

If our nation is to compete in the world, it needs to be peopled by those with skills and work ethics that rate as the best in the world. That’s how America came to be the greatest nation. We didn’t win the wars with affirmative-action commanders. We didn’t beat Hitler to the atomic bomb with affirmative action scientists. We didn’t put the first men on the moon with affirmative action engineers.

Yet that is the direction in which we are moving now. We are treated to the sight and sound of people in Congress who are barely literate, who have no sense of history, who have never read the United States Constitution and have only a vague understanding of our form of government.

To rest our republic in such hands is truly to court disaster. You can find such people throughout government on every level, whether it be a city council, a county board of supervisors, a state legislature, or the swarming federal agencies in charge of everything.

You know those people are seat warmers at best, and officious intermeddlers at worst. They are incapable of bringing creativity or innovation to their offices. There are problems that need to be solved. They almost always need to hire consultants to do the kind of thinking we thought we hired them to do.

And let me clarify that I do not use the term “affirmative-action” in this context as a code for any specific ethnicity. There are plenty of people who fit that description of every ethnicity.

As we approach the breaking point of our economy, we hear increasingly the most competent workers in our society threaten to quit, to retire, or to expatriate themselves rather than have to work with incompetents, particularly those appointed to oversee them.

I can’t tell you how many doctors have told me, “When the day comes that I have to have my medical decisions second guessed by high school graduates, that’s the day I retire from medicine.” I wish I had a dollar for every business person who told me lately, “If they raise the taxes as high as they say they will, I may as well retire. I’m not going to work my ass off to earn a good living and then give more than half of it away when I earn it and the other half when I die.”

How much of that is just talk? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone will know until it happens. However much it turns out to be, it cannot good for our country.

Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.newflashpoint.com.