The Peter Principle, part II

If you’ve read the original book by Lawrence J. Peter and Raymond Hull that was published in 1969, you’ll remember why many people in power, whether it’s your boss all the way up to the President of the United States are incompetent.

In a nutshell, it describes how a person is promoted based on competency until the final promotion when the new job is beyond their capacity. They are incompetent to perform it, don’t get promoted any more, but get to keep the job.

I’m not suggesting that President Obama is incompetent. He is naive, intelligent but naive, but I am saying that our Secretary of State, John Kerry (D) is a poster child of The Peter Principle. His lack of understanding of world events is harmful to our nation and puts at risk our brave soldiers when we go to another fruitless war or two.

If you don’t think he is in far too deep, just listen to his speeches. You’ll be embarrassed.

The other example of The Peter Principle that comes to mind, is the Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R). His lack of leadership is sinking the Republican Party, and as his congressional tenure is now twenty four years, I think that it’s about time he retired. He’ll get a huge (publicly funded) federal pension and someone else will become Speaker and feed from the congressional trough for a while.

He may be a nice person as illustrated by his attempts at being the Mr. Nice Guy Speaker, but he is not right for the job. That job requires a strong personality.

At this time the Republican’s have attached a rider to the Homeland Security funding bill, attempting to block the president’s immigration position. True to form, the Republicans will show weakness and abandon its attempt. Why? Because it may look bad, as the public may see it as undermining our alleged security services.

The Republicans (as well as the Democrats) know that the only use of the American public is to get them reelected by checking the correct ballot boxes on election day, then forgotten about. They are afraid that some of them may not be. Now that would be really, really bad.

What they don’t realize is that the American public has a very, very short memory. As the next election isn’t for a year and a half, no matter what happens it will be forgotten.

We’ll have so many fresh crises by then, plus another war or two that this kerfuffle will be long forgotten. Do you remember sequestration?

——————————————–

Editors note, March 4, 2015. As predicted the Republican party leadership caved again. You can read about it here, and keep in mind that they gave in when the press focused on Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress. Well timed.