29th March 2018, 7:50 PM
Betsy DeVos is wildly incompetent, yes. She also wants to destroy public education and replace it with more charter schools, which are not better and would make education worse. Keeping that from happening is important. She also got the job she has because of corruption and nepotism -- her brother Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, was a huge Trump backer who also tried to help set up some backchannel connections with Russia. And yeah, she has a thing for saying really dumb things, like she did in that interview. So yes, there are plenty of reasons to dislike her.
However, I do wonder if she gets SO much focus and hate because she's a woman. I mean, there are a lot of people in Trump's cabinet who are incompetent, and the whole cabinet's PURPOSE is to destroy the government and undermine federal agencies with mismanagement and actively destructive policies, pretty much. Excepting national security, almost every other cabinet secretary has been chosen because they hate and want to destroy the department they are administering. Betsy DeVos is very far from the worst, most worrying, or most potentially destructive member of this cabinet; I'd choose Scott Pruitt for worst cabinet member for sure, every time. He is doing a good job at literally burning the planet to the ground as quickly as possible, and undoing as many environmental rules as he possibly can; it will take a lot to recover from this damage. Fortunately some states, led by California, are fighting back against him. And "National Security Adviser John Bolton" is a really scary thing too! But it's DeVos who gets the most hate, and she's one of the only women. I do doubt that that's a cooincidence. To compare her to maybe the other most incompetent cabinet secretary, Rick Perry is, going by what I read, basically an empty chair, an utterly incompetent nothing who has no clue about the Energy Department's mission (nuclear energy and research, mostly) and doesn't have anywhere near the intelligence to lead that department. But while he gets mocked by the press every so often, DeVos gets FAR more attention despite being maybe actually a little bit less wildly incompetent than Perry is...
However, I do wonder if she gets SO much focus and hate because she's a woman. I mean, there are a lot of people in Trump's cabinet who are incompetent, and the whole cabinet's PURPOSE is to destroy the government and undermine federal agencies with mismanagement and actively destructive policies, pretty much. Excepting national security, almost every other cabinet secretary has been chosen because they hate and want to destroy the department they are administering. Betsy DeVos is very far from the worst, most worrying, or most potentially destructive member of this cabinet; I'd choose Scott Pruitt for worst cabinet member for sure, every time. He is doing a good job at literally burning the planet to the ground as quickly as possible, and undoing as many environmental rules as he possibly can; it will take a lot to recover from this damage. Fortunately some states, led by California, are fighting back against him. And "National Security Adviser John Bolton" is a really scary thing too! But it's DeVos who gets the most hate, and she's one of the only women. I do doubt that that's a cooincidence. To compare her to maybe the other most incompetent cabinet secretary, Rick Perry is, going by what I read, basically an empty chair, an utterly incompetent nothing who has no clue about the Energy Department's mission (nuclear energy and research, mostly) and doesn't have anywhere near the intelligence to lead that department. But while he gets mocked by the press every so often, DeVos gets FAR more attention despite being maybe actually a little bit less wildly incompetent than Perry is...