I watched some of the Senate confirmation hearings for several of president-elect Trump’s proposed cabinet members.
Reflecting on yesterday’s hearings, the president-elect’s close aide Kellyanne Conway “blasted Democrats for ‘trying to embarrass’ the incoming administration’s Cabinet nominees,” according to The Hill.
Following yesterday’s hearing of Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education — billionaire Betsy DeVos — Conway said, “This idea of humiliating and trying to embarrass qualified men and women who just wish to serve this nation is reprehensible,”
Charles P. Pierce at Esquire, however, has quite a different take in his “The Betsy DeVos Hearing Was an Insult to Democracy.” Sub-title, “Who are the real grizzlies?” (More about the grizzlies later.)
“It was not a hearing,” Pierce says. Rather:
It was the mere burlesque of a hearing, rendered meaningless by a preposterously accelerated process that rendered all questioning perfunctory and that left all cheap evasions hanging in the air of the committee room the way cigarette smoke used to canopy the proceedings back in the day. You would not hire a gardener through the process by which Betsy DeVos likely is going to become the Secretary of Education. A public school system wouldn’t hire her to work the cafeteria line at lunch. It was appalling. It was unnerving. It was a grotesque of how an evolved democracy should operate. It was business as usual these days and it likely isn’t going to matter a damn.
Pierce provides several examples of why he feels that “DeVos doesn’t know enough about education policy to feed to your guppies.”
Such as Senator Franken’s exchange with DeVos on the distinction in education between proficiency and growth, which the education “expert” totally flunked and on which Pierce at one point comments, “At this point, the nominee was further at sea than Magellan ever was.”
Getting back on course, Pierce highlights the exchange between “rookie” senator Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire and DeVos where Hassan “doggedly pursued a $5 million donation made by a foundation ostensibly run by DeVos’ mother to Focus on the Family, the anti-gay extremist chop-shop that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.”
There are several other interesting exchanges and “dodges” on IRS returns (“a clerical error”); on DeVos’ personal or professional experience with federal student loans; on the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. On the latter, according to Pierce:
[Senator Maggie] Hassan, who has a son with cerebral palsy who went through the public school system in her town, produced a very impressive “I am not buying an ounce of this crapola” face and Tim Kaine, a senator who achieved some prominence last summer, pinned DeVos to the wall
Read more on the Kaine-DeVos exchange here.
There was one incredible exchange, which this author — a satire lover — would have classified as “life imitating satire” and one about which I intended to write an entire (satire) piece.
However, the underlying issue is so delicate that I’ll refrain for now and will just quote the author of the Esquire piece:
But the piece de resistance, now famous in song and story and on YouTube, came when Christopher Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, tried to get a straight answer on whether or not DeVos was in favor of firearms in the public schools. She tried the looking-forward-to-working-with-you dodge. Ultimately, she moved on to leaving-things-to-the-states. Hilarity ensued.
Murphy: Do you think guns have any place in or around schools?
DeVos: That is best left to locales and states to decide. If the underlying question…
Murphy: You can’t say definitively today that guns shouldn’t be in schools?
DeVos: I will refer back to Senator [Mike] Enzi and the school he was talking about in Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.
Pierce concludes by summarizing his introductory paragraph as follows:
It was low, insulting burlesque and a revolting dumbshow of the arrogance of monied ignorance. I think we’re all going to have to get used to that kind of thing.
CODA: I am 99 percent sure that the inimitable satirist Andy Borowitz will have more to say about “the grizzlies.” If anyone can satirize this in a fitting manner, Borowitz can. This piece will then be updated.
Lead image: Denali National Park and Preserve
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.