Sound drums and trumpets! Our absurd president has made a big deal recently over his plan to infuse the federal bureaucracy’s DNA with the orthodoxies of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). It occurs to me, however, that his own administration refutes the dazzling claims made on behalf of DEI. For the evidence seems to show that when you base staffing decisions on superficial characteristics like skin tone, body parts and magical thinking about gender, you can’t count on good results.
Take Joe Biden’s choice of a vice president. Guys like him are always on the lookout for an opportunity to make DEI history, which is why he plucked Kamala Harris from the Senate to be his running mate. She’s a BIPOC—actually a twofer BIPOC, in that she’s of mixed African-American and Indian heritage. So Harris got the nod despite a startling record of incompetence and unlikability as a 2020 presidential candidate. The Biden team no doubt calculated that glowing media coverage would cover up her otherwise obvious deficiencies. Alas, however, American public life is pitiless in its exposure of personal defects, and those of our current veep have been glaringly exposed. But perhaps Biden is cannier than people think: He may have selected Harris on the King Charles II principle. That monarch, it will be recalled, once remarked to his brother James that “No man in England will kill me to make you king.” With Harris as his heir presumptive, you have to figure that Joe feels secure in the Oval.
Then there’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, another unsuccessful 2020 Democratic presidential candidate—though it’s likely that he was really auditioning for the vice-presidential slot. He lost that one to Harris but did manage to snag a Cabinet gig. And more DEI history was made: Mayor Pete became the first LGBTQ+ Transportation Secretary. Probably he figured that it would be a soft billet, because his approach to the job has been…lackadaisical. Buttigieg led off with a two-month maternity leave—this at a time when the US was suffering through a supply chain crisis caused by various transportation issues. Then followed more transportation whoopsies, capped by his dismal performance over the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and chemical spill. Somehow Buttigieg managed to give the impression that it wasn’t really his problem: What, did people expect him actually to visit some pissant little berg in Deplorable America? Clearly, being LGBTQ+ does not necessarily guarantee either a respectable work ethic or the common touch.
Over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Presidential Press Secretary Karine-Jean-Pierre is on the job. She, like Vice President Harris, is a history-making DEI twofer: BIPOC and LGBTQ+. She replaced Jen Psaki, who broke no new ground on the DEI front, so one presumes KJP was judged to be an improvement over her predecessor. But in practice, she gives quite the opposite impression: Compared to KJP, Ms. Psaki was a veritable Cicero at the Press Room podium. A general air of cluelessness, frequent ignorance of basic facts, and an inability to dissemble convincingly combine to define KJP’s default setting. Her major contribution to the national discourse is the phrase top of mind, which she deployed in an embarrassingly lame attempt to explain away Biden’s memorable “Where’s Jackie?” gaffe. (Representative Jackie Walorski had been dead for a month. Oops…) The best that can be said of Ms. Jean-Pierre is that she’s well matched with her boss, our stumblebum president.
Oh, and then there’s former Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy Sam Brinton, who was among the edgiest of Biden’s DEI hires. Brinton identifies as gender-fluid/non-binary, uses the pronouns they/them and frequently dresses the part, so you can understand why their (I mean Brinton’s) appointment was greeted by hosannahs and waving palm fronds in progressive circles. But the comrades were less thrilled to discover that they (I mean Brinton) had a habit of filching ladies’ luggage from airport baggage claim carousels, for which he was sacked after being arrested on two counts of grand larceny. Talk about your LGBTQ+ debacle! And Brinton is the gift who keeps on giving. A Texas-based fashion designer whose luggage went missing at DC’s Ronald Reagan National Airport in 2018 came forward recently to claim that photographic evidence shows Brinton wearing an item of clothing from her lost luggage! Now how in the world did the FBI background check on this…person of gender…nominated for a senior position concerning things nuclear manage to miss their (I mean Brinton’s) serial luggage thievery?
It may well be argued that there are plenty of white-bread cisgendered Republican guys and gals who’d be equally lousy as vice president, transportation czar, presidential mouthpiece or national nuclear waste janitor. True, but they’d be savaged in the media and chased out of office in disgrace. Thanks, however, to progressivism’s zany obsession with DEI, we’re still saddled with Harris, Buttigieg and Jean-Pierre. Brinton, at least, is gone and I suppose that’s a hopeful sign. Progressives are crazy, sure, but not that crazy…so far, at least…