Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the least competent of them all?

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In the news this week are two stories that I find intriguing. In one, it’s rumored that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos may be resigning soon. Seems she’s in w-a-a-a-y over her head in pushing her anti-public school, pro-religion agenda. In the other story, Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggested we could do away with sexual assault by…wait for it…firing up our coal power plants and simply turning on the lights. [Apparently, light provided by nuclear power plants, windmills and hydroelectric dams does nothing to prevent rape.] 

It’s neck-and-neck in the race to determine which of these two morons is the least qualified of Donald J. Trump’s swamp creature cabinet, and maybe the least qualified cabinet officials of all time. I think they both have a slight edge over Dr. Ben Carson, who presumably still believes the Egyptian pyramids are full of grain.

Let’s take Perry first.

Speaking during an energy policy discussion with “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and Axios CEO and founder Jim VandeHei, Perry advanced the theory that expanding the use of fossil fuels could help prevent sexual assault. In discussing a recent trip to Africa, Perry said a young girl told him that energy is important to her because she often reads by the light of a fire with toxic fumes.

“But also from the standpoint of sexual assault,” Perry said. “When the lights are on, when you have light that shines, the righteousness, if you will on those types of acts.”

First off, neither of those two word salads is a complete sentence, and second, WTF is he talking about? I’m convinced that comments like those are what the term “argle bargle” was invented for. Watch me while I debunk Perry’s theory:

If I climb up the highest hill here in town, I could probably see three coal-fired power plants. They’re all around me because, well, this is where the coal used to be. Two of them are even still in operation. I also read the local newspaper every day, and have remarked in the past about the shocking number of sexual assaults reported, which seems to be out of proportion for such a small town.

So, you do the math: If we have three coal plants here but still have way too many sexual assaults, then Perry’s theory doesn’t compute – unless, of course, the people of Fairmont just don’t turn on their lights often enough. Maybe that’s the problem. Turn on a light, prevent sexual assault. Just say no, end the drug epidemic. The Trump administration has a simplistic answer to everything, ginned up I assume by their simple minds.

Who knew thinking could be so complicated?

And then there’s DeVos. Trump’s education secretary was described this week as “one of the most ineffective people ever to hold the job.” Politico reported that the billionaire evangelical Christian “has found herself stymied by the bureaucratic restraints on her job,” and that “bringing about change in Washington requires time, patience and government savvy – three things she does not have.”

DeVos, said Politico’s Tim Alberta, is on a “religiously infused journey to reimagine the relationship between government, parents, teachers and schools.” She wants to allow parents more freedom to withdraw their children from public schools and enroll them in charter schools, religious schools and private schools, and expects that your federal tax dollars will follow those children out of the public school system.

Here’s the problem: Public schools receive very little of their funding from the federal government. They are financed in large part by state and local taxes in places where public schools – located as close as possible to where students actually live – are still very popular.

In other words, not every student in America has access to a religious, private or charter school. Think rural West Virginia, where many kids already suffer long bus rides just to get to the schools that are actually there. Imagine if a kid from, say, Calhoun County had to travel to Parkersburg to attend school. That’s three to four hours round trip every day. And that’s only one example from one small state. What about big states like Nebraska or New Mexico or Montana?

Betsy DeVos lives in Holland, Michigan, which sits inside a triangle that connects Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit with Lake Michigan in the center. I’m not sure she even knows there is a rural America.

Finally, there was a third story that archaeologists have found a “void” inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. I perked up when I read that, thinking Dr. Carson might be onto something, until I got to the part that said the void “was probably empty space designed by the pyramid’s architects to lessen the weight on its chambers and prevent them from collapsing.”

There was no evidence that grain was stored inside.