Competence? Or ideology? Which do you think?

Why, yes, you're right. For the current president's administration, ideology does indeed trump everything, including competence.

Now I don't say that, given two lawyers (or whatever job you're talking about) of equal ability, a president shouldn't hire the one who is of his particular political bent. The problem is that this president hires people who agree with him even when they are incompetent.

You can see the entire history of the Coalition Provisional Authority for exhibit 1 through a very large number, as Rajiv Chandrsekharan points out in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an unflinching look at a series of steadily increasingly bad decisions, many of which created the situation we are in today (e.g., disbanding the army, de-Baathification, the decision to privatize instead of repair industry, the 'one district' voting which guaranteed sectarian resentment and dissent); without exception the key players could be described with this formula: X had no experience in Y but was [a GOP loyalist/heavy contributor], where X is a person or company and Y is what they were in charge of.

You can add Brownie (heckuva job), think of Miers (most qualified), and George Deutsch, Paul Bonicelli, Ellen Sauerbrey, Julie Myers...

That's the pattern and has been. So when Ed over at Dispatches raises questions about Regent University grads working for the administration - Regent being, as the Boston Globe points out, a "tier four" school in the US News & World Report rankings, the lowest score and essentially a tie for 136th place - all anyone who's been paying attention can say is,

"And your point is?"

(I'm guessing his point is that the current president and his whole administration are totally worthless toads, but then, what else is new?)