The 13th Century Turk poet Rumi once wrote, “The fish first stinks at its head,” and in this case, Joe Biden is certainly an appropriate place to start in demonstrating the disconnect between competency and ideology.

In the East Room of the White House this week, Joe Biden celebrated National Poem day. His staff loaded in his speech, and a poem he was to read, into a teleprompter large enough that it could also serve as the main attraction at a Super Bowl watch party. Could he simply read the poem? Come on, man, what do you think?

In the same room on Wednesday, this time at a Women’s history month event, Joe Biden made this claim.

So women’s history month is no longer about women’s history. It’s about any potential voting bloc the Democrats can see helping them, of course excepting white people. You don’t even have to be a woman to be included in women’s history month. You just can’t be Caucasian. And by the way, we now have a brand-new protected class? LGBTQ survivors? I know of Holocaust survivors. I am grateful and blessed to be a cancer survivor. I know plenty of people who have survived being injured, sometimes grievously, in combat. There are millions of people who are rape survivors. There are countless numbers of survivors of physical and emotional abuse. The list goes on. But there’s a common thread running through all these survivors. They’ve all survived something awful and traumatic. That’s what makes them survivors. If there are now LGBTQ survivors, is Biden talking about the lifestyle as being a trauma that needs to be survived? Is he really championing people that have escaped the LGBTQ lifestyle?

Of course, not. He’s diluting women’s month, taking away the very thing that makes the month about the gender its there to celebrate, and throwing away the definition of women altogether in order to pander to males impersonating women. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s Supreme Court pick, could not or more importantly would not define what a woman was during her confirmation hearing, and she is one. The ideology is there and on full display, but he just isn’t competent enough to articulate what he is intending to say. And he’s not alone.

His vice president, Kamala Harris, issued on official letterhead a congratulatory statement to Dylan Mulvaney, a man who just two years ago appeared as a contestant on the Price Is Right.

Dylan Mulvaney is clearly a gay man. That’s certainly his choice. He has now, according to Kamala Harris, dressed up and identified as a woman for a year consecutively. That’s also his choice. But that no more makes him a woman than me eating pizza every day for a year makes me Italian. It certainly isn’t worthy of a commendation letter by the Vice President of the United States, and again during Women’s History Month, especially to someone who is not a woman. As for competence, let’s just the Veep speak for herself.

Well, who can argue with that. Let’s also just say that former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown never included competence as one of Harris’ strong suits when talking about what skill sets she brings to the table. And all this comes two weeks after Dr. Jill Biden awarded the International Medal of Courage award on International Women’s Day to a biological male.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week. He was proud to say what the goals were for this year at Foggy Bottom, and why he needs additional funding in his budget.

And here I thought deterring Xi from taking Taiwan, trying to finish off Putin in Ukraine, keeping our nose out of internal Israeli affairs, not trying to replace the Abraham Accords with the Beijing Accords, and not serving as an escort service for Iran to get a nuclear bomb would be more important priorities for Blinken. Nah, DEI is the future of world diplomacy.

As for competence, whenever there’s a military mission conducted, it’s followed by an after-action report. Usually, that’s done within just a matter of days, or weeks if it’s a complicated mission. The colossal screwup in Afghanistan, where we summarily retreated against a rogue band of terrorists, killing thousands of Afghanis, 13 of our servicemembers, and abandoning tens of thousands more that stood by our side and assisted in our fight against these same terrorists, happened almost two years ago. The White House, including Blinken himself on several occasions, has branded the operation as a hallmark of success of this administration. And yet the after-action report never happened. Why? Because it wasn’t a success by any objective measure. It was a inexcusable failure, and it’s been compounded by slow-walking the follow-up report.

This isn’t competence, it’s coverup. If the screwup is bad enough that it takes nearly two years to create a whitewashed report, it’s a cover-up, and not a very good one at that.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra testified to the House Ways and Means Committee with hat in hand for next year’s operating budget. Of course, he wants more money, too. Let’s see how he’s doing first on the competency argument. Does he know how many people show up for work to HHS currently? Surely, you jest.

Okay, how about something a little more micro, rather than the macro of how many people work in the department you oversee. What about the fate of those 85,000 unaccompanied minors that have crossed the border illegally and are in your charge? How are those kids doing? What’s that, you say? No f’ing idea?

But you want more money. Why is that, exactly? Well, to pay for the expanded staffing concerns, of course.

EPA director Michael Regan gets included as well, since he testified about his own budgetary needs at Ways and Means. He was asked about his own agency’s renewable fuel standards and guidelines. Basic stuff if you’re running the EPA. No clue.

But he does know he needs more money in next year’s budget for environmental justice concerns.

I’ve spared you Karine Jean-Pierre, Pete Buttigieg, and a cast of thousands that populate the Biden administration. They have one singular focus, and that is to dumb down the society to its lowest DEI denominator. Virtually nothing else, including their operational purview, seems important enough on which to become briefed. I’ll leave you with this. The incompetence pandemic spreads all the way down to district court nominees. This guy is up for a federal trial judgeship. His name is Kato Crews, and at his confirmation hearing at Senate Judiciary, John Kennedy all but ended his nomination with one question – any idea what a Brady motion is?

Now I’m not a lawyer. I didn’t go to law school. I do not have esquire behind my name. But I’ve worked for a lawyer for almost 25 years. I do know that at least for now, there’s still a rule of law principle that defendants get to see the evidence and testimony, especially exculpatory evidence, in order to mount a defense. And if a prosecutor hides the ball from the defense, especially if it’s exculpatory evidence, a Brady motion is filed and heard by the judge before the case proceeds.

Again, I’m no lawyer, but I knew that. It’s astounding to me that a person nominated to be a judge and who is presenting himself as qualified to be a trial judge would not know that. Perhaps Alvin Bragg’s fatal flaw is the timing of his suit against Donald Trump. If he could have just waited a bit longer, he might have had more judges like Mr. Crews out there populating the bench from which to shop his case, since we’re basically throwing out the rule of law on this one anyway.