The new mandarins not up to the task

..."Our American mandarins gained their places by political image-mongering and bureaucratic infighting.  They lack the ethics and the wisdom to manage an empire or to be in charge of the lives and wealth of the American people. They are the accidental figureheads of an immense machine which they do not begin to comprehend but pretend to direct (to ends that are largely puerile and self-referential).  Yet they are busy playing incompetent games of manipulation in every place in the world.  The last American leader who had any remote claim to statesmanship was Eisenhower, who left office almost a half century ago”....

from “Observations and Lamentations on the Way We Are Now” by Clyde N. Wilson, “Chronicles.”