Laughter research has examined the phenomenon of an observer laughing at someone who slips on a banana peel and found the behavior benign. So, when you laugh at The Krait's parade of current Cabinet members, relax — it's not malevolent. In a way, it is an evasive reaction to the horror that is the current presidential administration. William Barr, this year's winner of the contest, is a laughable villain. If this is the (fair & balanced) condition of our times, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).
[x NY Fishwrap]
The Worst Trump Cabinet Member? — The Vote Wasn’t Even Close
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
The results are in, people, and it’s a landslide. Your choice for Worst Trump Cabinet Member is…
Attorney General William Barr! Barr was cited for multiple non-achievements. There was his misrepresentation of the findings of the Mueller report. And the decision to respond to Robert Mueller’s warning about Russian intervention in American elections by — as one voter put it — “opening investigations into the investigators.”
The bottom line was a quaint conviction that the attorney general is supposed to work for the public, not the president.
“I cannot believe I am stating this, but Jeff Sessions had more respect for the law,” wrote Diana from Centennial.
Second place went to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “Silence on Ukraine, sycophant to Trump, continues to demoralize the State Department, lack of support for his ambassadors,” wrote Isabelle Stillger, launching off in a very long list of complaints about Pompeo’s failure to … pretty much everything.
“First in his class at West Point and he ends up polishing Trump’s boots,” added Phyliss Dalmatian.
Still, the results weren’t even close. Besides his dedication to protecting the president from, um, criminal justice, Barr unnerved readers with his war against secularism. “The chief enforcer of the Constitution recently gave a speech decrying those who would interfere with Christian religious control of our government,” noted Sharon from Montana, who predicted Barr “will go down in history as the worst attorney general.”
Maybe it was partly the name. So many possible Barr rhymes.
“The new star — By far — Is Billy Barr,” announced Stephen Glynn. “Where’s the tar and feathers?”
We can skip tar and feathers. Our goal is not physical torture. Just humiliation.
As usual, we got a lot of complaints about the Worst Cabinet Member contest from people who said it was impossible to pick just one. (“There is a dead heat with all of them tied at the bottom.”)
Nobody, however, claimed there was a problem of shortage of possibilities.
Perpetual contender Betsy DeVos finished third. Readers pointed out that the secretary of education was recently held in contempt of court for refusing to support students victimized by crooked for-profit schools. But the bottom line was that Donald Trump’s top education official doesn’t like public schools. End of story.
On the plus side, DeVos has always gotten a bit of a slide from those who argue she’s too incompetent to be a major threat. There are several cabineteers in that category. “I’ve been thinking that Ben Carson must be in the Witness Protection Program,” wrote a voter from Nashua, N.H., about our secretary of housing and urban development. “Really, has anyone seen him in the last several months?”
The last Worst winner, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, dropped down to the middle of the pack despite his heroic bid for attention by threatening to fire officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who had the temerity to reassure the public that Trump’s do-it-yourself weather map threatening Alabama with a hurricane was fictional.
“The meteorology thing was awesome,” wrote John Merrill.
Perhaps our respondents have decided that Ross, for all his awfulness, also is too inept to pose much trouble. Nearly three years into the job, “he appears to be perpetually stuck on Level One of the learning curve,” theorized John Evans.
Still, there were a few whimpers about lack of achievement by officials like Elaine Chao, secretary of transportation and wife of Mitch McConnell. “The secretary, who would have never gotten a cabinet job without her spouse, has made Infrastructure Week into a punch line,” wrote a voter who gets extra credit for bringing infrastructure into the conversation.
A number of people suggested a Worst shout-out to Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, plus acting White House chief of staff. (Mulvaney is also winner of Longest Title award.) You’ll remember that famous interview in which Mick announced that Trump wanted to host the G7 summit at his hotel because “he still considers himself to be in the hospitality business.”
Rick Perry may be departing as energy secretary, but he’ll be hard to forget. His role as one of “the three amigos,” federal officials allegedly charged with handling Ukraine, would be enough. But Perry voters also seemed bathed in nostalgia for ineptitudes past. “Who are the three amigos? If he says ‘me, Volker and oops,’ he’s my guy,” wrote LJR from South Bay.
The cabinet members regarded as truly terrible were the non-inept ones. “He’s both energetic and fiendishly clever,” complained Edith Frick, casting her vote for Barr. Frick added, however, that if Worst had the “normal meaning of incompetency, clear winner is Ben Carson.” It’s amazing how familiar you readers are with Trump’s top officials. Especially since they come and go so quickly. William Barr has only been attorney general since February, and you’re thinking about him all the time.
A lot of our correspondents seemed torn between Barr and the duo of Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt and Andrew Wheeler, head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Penny White wavered back and forth, then finally decided she had to go with Bernhardt/Wheeler “from a sheer survival viewpoint.” She also wondered if anyone had contemplated cabinet-level Halloween masks.
Prize to the first person who goes trick-or-treating as the attorney general. ###
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page.Her most recent book is No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (2019), See other books by Gail Collins here. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University (WI) and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]
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