The Oxford English Dictionary defines kakistocracy as "a government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state." The Joe Biden administration has achieved the literal meaning of the definition from day one. An article by Liberty Nation's managing editor Mark Angelides headlined "A Bad Beginning for Crisis-Prone Biden" highlighted the hypocrisy in the two-day-old administration, which heralded the incompetence yet to come:
“Within hours of signing an executive order mandating the wearing of masks on all federal properties and grounds, President Biden was caught not wearing a mask in direct violation of his own rule. He removed his mask to make a speech at the Lincoln Memorial – which is indeed on federal land; other members of the Biden family were also seen without masks in place.”
Rising to the top of the White House's inept incidents list are the big three: the handling of the illegal immigrant invasion at the southern border, the overreach in introducing the COVID-19 vaccination program, and the ignominious and bumbling retreat from Afghanistan. Keep in mind these examples represent incompetence at the highest levels – incompetence flows down. And behind every ham-fisted performance seems to be a decision-maker chosen for reasons other than skill.
(Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills - Pool/Getty Images)
The administration’s handling of the U.S. southern border has been nothing short of criminal bungling. According to the Pew Research Center, when the Trump team held the management reins, the monthly flow had reached a low of 16,182 in April 2020. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has achieved "a 21-year high" in border encounters of people attempting to enter the United States illegally. In July 2021, Border Patrol agents engaged 199,777 illegals.
To make matters worse, the New York Post reported, "White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Friday [Sept. 3] confirmed that the government isn't requiring COVID-19 vaccines for people who illegally cross the US Mexican border – despite President Biden's new vaccine mandates for about two-thirds of US workers." As The Wall Street Journal put it, "The government releases migrants, untested, to live in tight spaces alongside scores of strangers." So, can the Biden team be trusted to keep citizens safe from disease-carrying migrants, criminals, and terrorists? Probably not.
Recently, Biden’s ill-conceived attempt to address the pandemic by mandating vaccinations has set off a firestorm of criticism. The backlash was immediate and drawn along political lines. The Guardian quoted a prominent Republican governor who reflected the sentiment of most "red state" executives:
"Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas, added to the growing Republican backlash on NBC's Meet the Press, telling host Chuck Todd that the president's directive to make the Covid-19 vaccination compulsory for businesses of greater than 100 employees was 'an unprecedented assumption of federal mandate authority … It really disrupts and divides the country,' Hutchinson said. 'It divides our partnership between the federal government and the states, and it increases the division in terms of vaccination when we should all be together trying to increase the uptake.'"
Liberty Nation's James Fite assessed the executive order this way: "No, Biden can't walk into a private company and start firing folks any more than he can hold people down and vaccinate them by force … " But, of course, the mandate does not apply to members of Congress or the federal court system and its staffers or the approximately 600,000 U.S. postal workers -- or to illegal aliens. So why does President Biden believe he can get away with this kind of imperial behavior? Simple, because the people who work for him are no more competent than he is – and evidently selected for that reason. Working with the state governors to develop a mutually agreeable solution would have been a more adult avenue to persuading people to be vaccinated. But that is not the Biden way.
Last, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the human carnage the Biden national security team left in its wake. The world has not seen the full measure of the results of this fiasco. The commander-in-chief's direction to evacuate from the exposed and undefendable Hamid Karzai International Airport contributed to 13 U.S. service members being killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber. Then in a display of poorly planned bravado, the president promised to get those who perpetrated the suicide bombing. Biden's fist-shaking turned into a drone strike on an aid worker carrying water to family members. According to Fox News, quoting a New York Times account, the man targeted, Zemari Ahmadi, apparently had no ties to ISIS-K. Furthermore, sources on the ground said that an additional nine people were killed; seven were children.
At this point, U.S. Central Command "remains confident that the strike was based on accurate intelligence." But the problem is that the deadly action was executed under the abysmally performing State Department and the demonstrably poor military planning of the senior U.S. defense leadership. It is a sad situation when people lose confidence in the institutions they depend on for national security. However, that's the hallmark of a kakistocracy.
Biden's White House seems to prove every day that, regardless of the nature of the challenge, it is not competent enough to avoid calamity. The president regularly displays his struggle to lead. Jed Babbin, writing for The American Spectator, made the point this way: "Biden and his team have failed so miserably in every aspect of foreign and domestic policy that we're compelled to recall what legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel said to the 1962 New York Mets: 'Can't anybody here play this game?'" Kakistocracies can be installed through a democratic process, as Americans are finding out -- painfully. The solution lies in the next election, one sure way to throw out the bums of the kakistocracy.
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