Why is employment backwards?

Why is it that all the intellectual failures get big, important, high-paying jobs with lots of power, while most of the people that were actually smart enough to do their homework regularly get the low-paying jobs without enough power to tell their bosses that they're being stupid?

Take government, especially the presidency (USA). I think most people would agree that most recent presidents have been idiots. At least Obama's trying, but how many times in the past 20 or so years have you thought "hey, that makes a lot of sense!" about the latest government announcement? Now take Microsoft: Bill Gates has about as much computer sense as my little finger, and the programmers he got were the ones who got rejected everywhere else. The basic Windows operating system: giant space-hog with lots of crappy programs that either crash or freeze the computer. It takes years of patches just to get the system semi-stable. Now take the infamous Vista system. Take the merit of Windows base 0 and divide it by 4. You get Vista. After Vista, they finally realized that the programs had to actually work for people to buy them, but their programmers are so pathetic that they had to take ideas from other programs that actually work like tabs. Compare it with Linux or Unix: compact, simple operating systems that you can just add stuff to and it works, but Microsoft made a mint off of its crappy product by advertising the s* out of it. Now an actually good company with potential shows up with a better product and new ideas (Mac), and what does Microsoft do? It tries to sue the the company into submission for plagiarism on ideas Microsoft never owned over rediculous loopholes and tries to steal yet another idea for itself and shut out the competition. (Oh, and Mac isn't innocent either, the board actually FIRED its one moneymaking employee because they were happy to sit and do nothing, then had to beg to get him back when they started losing money)

With the possible exception of engineers, it seems like the stupidest people make the most money by exploiting the work of smart people who actually have a useful skill. WTF?!?

For anyone with the patience to actually read all this, thanks.