Ever since it invented the skid steer loader in 1960, the Bobcat Company claims on its website, it has “helped tackle the most difficult jobs in landscaping, agriculture, forestry, snow removal and more.”

Sixty-five years on, I’m sure that’s still true, but for the addition of one teensy-weensy caveat: beware of entrusting the “most difficult jobs” to greenhorns unsuited to the job by temperament and skill sets.

We’ve all seen what happens when we fail to do that.

Twenty-two years ago, a friend of mine rented a Bobcat to re-landscape his backyard. Eyeing the wreckage the next day, and blessed with a healthy ability to laugh at himself, the guy could only comment, “Man, the damage one fool on a Bobcat can do in an hour!”

Hint: a lot. Much damage. A helluva lot of damage. But in the case of the yard, at least reparable damage. The greater the bungling, however, the more time and money it would take to fix, and the greater the fearful likelihood the damage could not be undone.

Lately, I’ve caught myself rethinking that little story, and asking, what if we were to expand the fool’s potential radius of destruction?

What if some cocksure person, grossly out of his or her depth, but unwilling or unable to admit it, were given free reign to flex their ineptitude over a more significant field of action? One where shrubbery, grass and trees were no longer the victims, but human beings?

Why not? Human history is chock full of specimens who crossed such appalling thresholds. So, for the sake of the argument, let’s substitute for Bobcat Boy an incompetent general in command of an army.

Benjamin Butler, an effective if shady lawyer and capable politician of the mid-19th Century, turned out to be a terrible general, for whom President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) and his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, however, were compelled to provide a field command to placate certain powerful political and influential factions in the north.

Butler, as a contemporary described him, “a man of crossed eyes and mixed motives,” went on to bungle just about everything he tried to do. With the notable exception of getting his image painted inside the chamber pots of the women of New Orleans as payback for his suggestion for that they be treated, “as women of the evening, plying their avocation,” for dumping their “night soil” on the heads of his army.

Without qualification, Butler was awful and everyone knew it.

Now, let’s climb the ladder a bit. What if our greenhorn were a mayor, a governor, a head of state?

Our 15th U.S. President, James Buchanan (1857-1861), failed to lift a finger to deal with the war everyone saw coming, praying only that he’d be out of office before the first shot was fired in these words: “Not in my time, not in my time!”

Buchanan and Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), the latter elevated to the highest office upon Lincoln’s assassination, were multi-faceted studies in lousy and stinkeroo. Indeed, many historians rank them as our two worst presidents.

At last, to stop testing your patience, dear reader, I’ve now come to the big question: how do such transparently incompetent sorts, whom we would never trust to run a corner newsstand, end up in the high seat driving the Bobcat?

Well, as cartoonist Walt Kelley’s Pogo famously said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We are the ones who keep voting them into office.

This is why I believe that we, the American electorate, should henceforward demand that the would-be leaders of this nation take and pass rigorous examinations before they run with results we would all get to see to gauge their competence to hold the offices they seek, as well as assess their knowledge of and commitment to the U.S. Constitution and other crown jewels of our constitutional republic, such as:

1. Maintaining the division of powers between the Congress, the executive, and the judicial branches;

2. Guarding free speech, freedom of the press, the Second and 14th Amendments among others; and

3. Due process and habeas corpus, so we never again put human beings behind bars without affording them a hearing first. These two essentials to English Common Law date to the Middle Ages when King John reluctantly signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede.

Despite our many failings to uphold the bedrock principles that have made this country what it has been for nearly 250 years (see Justice Roger B. Taney and the Dred Scott decision for a notable example of failure), the bedrocks remain sound, for now. Yet, we may be the generation that sees them disappear.

The present administration in Washington reminds me of what the famous Roman historian Tacitus penned of a particularly odious emperor, more than 2,000 years ago:

“In the minds of the Roman people, he was fit to be emperor…Too bad he became emperor.”

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.