Turns out Mitt Romney was right, and OPM Director Katherine Archuleta was wrong.

Speaking as somebody whose family got personally affected by the OPM hack (21 million and counting): Barack Obama picked an amazing person to run that agency, huh?

Mitt Romney’s statements reveal “little understanding of what’s going on in the 21st century”: http://t.co/0JBikUFh #RomneyNotReady

— Katherine Archuleta (@Archuleta2012) October 22, 2012

(Via @JoanofArgghh)  Let me be absolutely clear on this.  Katherine Archuleta, OPM Director, was given the job for two reasons: one, she was Barack Obama’s national political director for the 2012 campaign. Two, she’s Latina:

Obama’s appointment of Archuleta comes after the president faced pressure from Latino advocacy groups to appoint Hispanics to serve in his second-term cabinet. More than seven in ten Latinos voted for Obama in last year’s election, but the number of Latino cabinet members is set to fall from two to one.

Although I suppose that we should also add  ‘three:’ she was a reliable soldier for the Obama administration. Particularly when it came to attacking Mitt Romney for his foreign policy views, which keep getting vindicated with horrifying regularity. Including, mind you, the problem of Chinese hacking – which got him resoundingly mocked by a variety of people who are right now trying to explain why they shouldn’t be mocked in turn.

But let’s not stray too far from the main point, which is this: OPM let itself get hacked, both in the computers-got-compromised-by-the-Chinese* sense, and in the Barack-Obama-chose-a-politico-to-a-job-far-above-her-competence-level sense. I submit that there is more to operating a major government organization than showing an uncritical willingness to be spectacularly wrong in the service of one’s political master; and that the only useful service that Katherine Archuleta could still perform for the Republic at this point is to resign in disgrace – and thus become a Horrible Example of Why you should take your hiring decisions seriously.  If she is unwilling to do this elementary act of basic patriotism under her own volition, Congress should absolutely perform an intervention and do it for her.

…I miss having grownups running the country.  I really and truly do.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Probably.