Led By Idiots? Yes. Sadly.

This morning I read a very short article from The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech. It's called, "Consider the Possibility That We Are Led by Idiots". This is a very short read and very skeptical, but I can corroborate every word he's written just from the knowledge I've accumulated at the very low level at which I've worked trying to influence government.
Here is a bit of the opening paragraph:

I have seen cabinet secretaries who type with two fingers. I have listened as senior staffers with authority over constructing legislation in a particular scientific field engage in debate on whether or not the moon landing was a hoax. I have seen a man charged with revolutionizing incredibly complex government information technology systems who did not know how to use a thumb drive.

Once Common Core was 'dead', I stopped going to the Capitol and lobbying on educational issues. Part of this was because I was personally attacked by a number of individuals affiliated in some way with the group Oklahoma Parents and Educators for Public Education after I evaluated and wrote about the proposed (now adopted) Oklahoma educational standards, and I didn't want my name, and my husband and kids to suffer needlessly because of a handful of 'give me more money for education' bullies. Today, lies sell and they sell infinitely well across social media platforms and it's beyond hard to convince anyone that anything they read on a social media platform ISN'T true (smh - hashtag fake news lives). Interestingly, I was proven right in my analysis (which was mainly just a re-statement of the analysis of others) in at least one major way when Oklahoma's State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister was forced to apply to the federal government for a 'waiver' because our standards were 'too vague to test', but the damage these people desired to do had been done and it all proved too little too late.
Another reason I stopped was because of lessons I learned, during the many years we fought against Common Core, about the way government runs. Honestly, government today is run - in many instances - by EXACTLY the same kind of people Ben Domenech writes about in the first paragraph of his article. Unfortunately, government is all about money and power, and who you know, and very little about actual intelligence, the law, or the welfare of the people. Those appointed to agencies by the Governor or who populate non-profit and government boards are the same 20 people, they just move around in a circle within an echo-chamber where everyone at the end of one meeting claps each other on the back with a knowing smile and says, "see you soon" knowing they'll all see each other at the next fill-in-the-blank meeting, knowing they'll all pick up their taxpayer-provided check for expenses to exchange knowing glances across at another table across town where they'll utter a variation on theme of the words they all just uttered at a meeting around a different table a few days before. It's crap - all of it - and it's completely out of reach of control by the people it's supposed to benefit.
Yes, our personal lives are being ordered - in large part - by idiots. The worst part of it all being that the vast majority of these are unelected bureaucratic idiots - and, like feral hogs, much harder to hunt down and get rid of.