Say "Cheers!" for incompetence

Toasting the toasted in high places.

Apr 21, 2026

I’ve been reading a rather dry survey of the U.S. Constitution by egghead Yuval Levin, actually not reading, but listening to the audio book. Some books are better experienced as audio books, like Bono’s “Surrender” and Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary”; I don’t think even Ray Porter could have made “American Covenant” intriguing, but it is highly relevant. Levin argues that our founders intended, and designed the Constitution to be a catalyst for unity, through tension, compromise, and competition. Americans are forced to seek the best (sometimes defined as least bad) solution for the most people in a messy, kinetic, and frequently deadlocked process of government. One of the areas that I don’t think Levin covered (maybe he has, I am still working my way through the book) is incompetence.

Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer with President Donald Trump. The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Until yesterday, Lori Chavez-DeRemer was the Secretary of Labor for President Donald Trump. Her stewardship of the department was marked by (accusations of) abuse of power, having a sexual relationship with a subordinate, and lots of drinking at the taxpayers’ expense. The folio of (alleged) abuses includes telling aides to take care of her family’s wishes, planning personal trips under color of official business, and drinking alcohol on the job. While she was having her bender, the department under her leadership cancelled contracts to combat child labor and slave labor, and roll back protections for home health care workers, while promoting the unionization of federal employees.

Now Chavez-DeRember is gone. She has joined the ranks of former Trump cabinet members whose incompetence have gotten them the boot: Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem.

There are three more imbeciles in power who need to go next, and their incompetence at their jobs may actually make things easier for the next administration to clean up their departments. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t necessarily incompetent, from the point of view that he really believes and is invested in his booby-headed idiotic fringe ideas about vaccines and “precious bodily fluids.” In his devotion to these ideals, RFKJr is totally competent at dismantling many of the health protocols which have protected American children from debilitating diseases. But as a protector of American health, he’s the most incompetent person ever to head the gargantuan Health and Human Services department.

The problem with RFKJr is that he hasn’t embarrassed his boss enough to get booted, and he has no intention of leaving on his own. This is his shot to do the thing be has been touting for decades. I only hope that HHS itself will offer enough benign resistance to slow the agenda.

It’s a different story with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth. Patel is suing “The Atlantic” for defamation over a long-form piece detailing his own abuses, drunken parties, and abandonment of the FBI as a professional law enforcement organization, to use them as a personal vengeance squad for his boss and himself. The suit alleges that the magazine and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick “published these statements with actual malice.”

Funny thing, the First Amendment. Even if Fitzpatrick’s article is a genuine hit piece, it’s protected. Even if her allegations turn out to be false, she cannot be compelled to give up confidential sources, or be sued for writing what she believed to be solid reporting. That’s how the press works. Patel is a public figure, a government employee in a high position. Hit pieces are part and parcel of the job, and suing the magazine and reporter, he will find out, has no effect at all, as a judge will throw the suit out with gusto.

The real question is, what does it say about Kash Patel that he copes with reporting alleging he is a drunken sop, unfit for his position? I think perhaps the reporting is a bit too on the nose, to provoke a lawsuit. Patel may not only be incompetent at runing the FBI, he may also be incompetent dealing with an unfriendly media. At least Donald Trump has the knack for dealing with the press, even when they trash him repeatedly. Trump gets that all publicity is good, even negative publicity, to the narcissist.

What to say about Pete Hegseth? He has tried to put a veil around his “Department of War” that won’t call the war in Iran a war. A federal judge overthrew the DOD’s draconian rules for reporters, citing the same First Amendment that will plague Kash Patel. The press has a right to report on the activities of the government, and the government can’t willy-nilly shut them down and only allow friendly propaganda-spewing outlets to repeat their spoon-fed lines. Of course, making actual friends with reporters and allowing them to decide how to report works a whole lot better than making every reporter an enemy.

I am no fan of Washington-based press. They are among the most self-indulgent, self-important, big-headed people in all of media. However, when they get things right, Hegseth has no right to stop them, even if it results in some bad press for him. We haven’t yet found the bottom of the ocean of bad press for Hegseth, but we may be close. During a Pentagon worship service, Hegseth, at the pulpit, quoted the fake version of “Ezekiel 25:17” that Quentin Tarantino wrote for Samuel L. Jackson’s character to say in the movie “Pulp Fiction”. No, he really did.

The actual verse deals with God’s wrath upon the Philistines and the Kerethites: “I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I take vengeance on them.” The fake version…well it’s what a hit man says to sound cool before he pops someone. It also embodies Hegseth’s approach to life and war. He is the “ate up major” who thrives on chest-bumping and making everyone who isn’t like himself feel small.

It is a good thing that the actual warfighters are competent, well-trained, and motivated in their jobs. Hegseth is inside his Pentagon bubble, spewing incompetent drivel, which is about where such a person should be—always promote incompetence up the chain, says the Peter Principle.

Getting back to the core of Yuval Levin’s walk through the Constitution, when a president decides to take hammer and tongs to the executive branch, the people he has to surround himself with (second term) must be invested in the task of destruction. That creates kinetic tension of its own, as the incompetents, drunks, abusers, and self-important hosers make their own beds and have to lie in them. Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer have found that bed is cold, hard, and full of thorns, not roses. I am waiting for RFKJr, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth to come to the same ends. My money is on their eventual ejection from the job before Trump’s term is done—if not by impeachment.

Thus Levin’s contention that the Constitution limits and through competing power claims, corrects, the worst instincts of politicians, and begins to heal the wounds these people create. Thank God for, and let’s drink to, James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Their foresight may be our national salvation.

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