This is another one from Rachel Hurley. She asks a very pertinent question -- why aren't we judging white men by the same standard as we judge others? Read it!
--Kim
Rachel Hurley
I'm having one of those days where I'm feeling fed up and sick of everybody's bullshit.
We have been having a 60-year public debate about whether women are too emotional to hold power, whether Black leaders are ready to run major institutions, whether immigrants can be trusted with authority, whether queer people create instability in the workplace - it's okay to question everyone's abilities - everyone except white men.
Every hiring decision, every promotion cycle, every Senate confirmation gets filtered through some version of that anxiety. And meanwhile, the unexamined control group - the white men who've been running things without interruption since the founding - has a record that nobody seems interested in reviewing.
SO, let's review it.
We could go much further back than this, but this is what I can think about right now. I know you will tell me what I left out in the comments - and this ONE time - I will allow it. 
The 2008 financial crisis was designed, approved, rated, sold, and detonated almost entirely by white men. The CEOs of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and AIG were all white men. The regulators who decided not to regulate them were white men. The ratings agencies that called mortgage-backed garbage AAA were run by white men. Roughly $13 trillion in household wealth was wiped out.
Not one of them went to prison. Several were hired as consultants to fix the thing they broke.
The Iraq War decision chain runs entirely through George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell. All white men except for Powell. They told the public Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It didn't. They told the public the war would last weeks. It lasted two decades. At least 500,000 Iraqis died.
Nearly 5,000 American service members died.
The region is still destabilized in ways that are killing people today. Bush said he wished the intelligence had been different. Cheney said nothing. Rumsfeld said we don't know what we don't know and called it philosophy. None of them faced legal consequences. They still haven't really had to answer for their actions - it's just like OH WELL! WHOOPSIE.
Tony Blair - also a white man - told the British Parliament that Iraq had weapons deployable within 45 minutes. It didn't. When the Chilcot inquiry spent seven years documenting how badly wrong he was, Blair said he still believed the decision was right and would do it again. He is now on Trump's Board of Peace.
The man who helped start a war on false pretenses is literally on a board called the Board of Peace.
Now we get to the part where it gets almost funny, except people are dying.
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff - both white men, both real estate developers with no foreign policy credentials and no nuclear expertise - were assigned to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. They chose not to bring technical experts to the talks.
Witkoff told reporters he wouldn't call himself a nuclear expert but had "studied it" and was "competent." Nuclear scientists publicly called his assessment of Iran's research reactor riddled with "technical errors." The reactor he described as a secret weapons facility physically cannot enrich uranium. That's not disputed. That's just what research reactors are.
Iran was reportedly ready to make concessions, which is probably why the war started two days before the next round of talks. If they concede to our requests - how can we kill them? DUH.
And then there is Pete Hegseth, the least experienced defense secretary in American history, according to the assessment of people who track these things going back to 1776, got confirmed by a single tie-breaking vote. He shared classified military strike details in a Signal chat that included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer. He boasted about "complete control of Iranian skies" right before Iran shot down an American F-15E. He then fired the Army's top general, reportedly because the general was telling him the war plans were unworkable.
Then there is probably the worst of them all, Stephen Miller, whose own family came to America as refugees from persecution, who has spent a decade designing immigration policy that treats refugees as an existential threat. He is still the most powerful unelected person in the White House.
JD Vance, is probably the most powerful with the least amount of power. He built his entire political brand on not starting foreign wars. When Trump wanted to go to war with Iran and it became clear that it was happening regardless, Vance shifted. He reportedly argued that Trump should strike quickly. When the war went sideways, he gave a speech in North Carolina, offered brief remarks, wished the troops a happy Easter, and is now ready to start campaigning for his 2028 presidential run.
Then there's lil Marco Rubio, who said Israel forced Trump's hand. Trump publicly disagreed. Rubio walked it back. Then walked back the walkback. He is also positioning for 2028.
Now I want you to think about the arguments we've had our entire lives about who's qualified to lead.
The question of whether a woman could handle the presidency under pressure. Whether a Black or Latino is capable of managing a FOOTBALL team? Whether a queer person in the military would be a "distraction." Whether an immigrant could be loyal enough to this country. Every one of those conversations treated the concern as reasonable, the scrutiny as appropriate, the bar as necessary.
We never applied any of it to the people already in the room.
The people already in the room collapsed the global economy, started a war on fabricated evidence, negotiated a nuclear deal without reading the briefing materials, fired the generals who told them the truth, and are currently competing to see who gets to run things next.
The accountability structure is so thoroughly captured that Hegseth can share classified information with his family group chat and still run the Pentagon, while Kristi Noem gets fired for embarrassing Trump on television and Pam Bondi gets fired for not protecting Trump from Epstein files well enough.
The standard was never competence. The argument was never really about leadership ability.
It was always about who gets to be incompetent without consequences. And the answer to that question has been remarkably consistent for about 250 years.
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