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Continuing
the theme of Bush, the “worst president yet” (see
below), a designation
historians gave him in 2004 - a year before his historically low overall approval
ratings - and how bluffing, resume puffery and rampant cronyism have led to a ‘clear
and present danger’ today, with future consequences our children and
grandchildren will face. Thanks
to REH for passing along the Rich commentary. KwC Costs rising on Bush’s plans: from Iraq to Katrina, the president’s plans
are straining the federal budget http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0926/p01s01-usec.html How many more Mike Browns are out there? A TIME inquiry finds that at top
positions in some vital government agencies, the Bush Administration is putting
connections before experience http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1109345,00.html Many contracts for storm work raise questions: The first detailed tally of commitments
from federal agencies since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast four weeks ago
shows that more than 15 contracts exceed $100 million, including 5 of $500
million or more. Most of those were for clearing away the trees, homes and cars
strewn across the region; purchasing trailers and mobile homes; or providing
trucks, ships, buses and planes. More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed
by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding
or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among
auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse. Already, questions
have been raised about the political connections of two major contractors - the
Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton - that
have been represented by the lobbyist Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's former
campaign manager and a former leader of FEMA. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/26/national/nationalspecial/26spend.html Bring Back Warren Harding By Frank Rich, NYT,
Sunday, September 25, 2005 THERE are no
coincidences. On Monday, as L. Dennis Kozlowski was slapped with 8 to 25 years
in jail for looting Tyco International of some $150 million, the feds were
making their first arrest of a high-ranking member of the Bush administration. The
official was David Safavian, the chief of White House federal procurement
policy who once worked for Jack Abramoff, the sleazy Republican lobbyist whose
disreputable client list, in another noncoincidence, included Tyco. While it's an accident
of timing that Mr. Safavian was collared at his suburban Virginia home just as
Mr. Kozlowski was sent to the slammer in New York, the two events could not
better bracket a corrupt era worthy of the Gilded Age. Ours will be
remembered as the Enron era. Enron itself is a distant memory - much like all
that circa 2000 talk of a smoothly efficient C.E.O. presidency led by a Harvard
M.B.A. and a former chief executive of Halliburton. But even as American
business has since been purged by prosecutions and reforms, the mutant Enron
version of the C.E.O. culture still rules in Washington: uninhibited cronyism,
cooked books, special-favors networks, the banishment of whistle-blowers and
accountability. More than ideology, this ethos has sabotaged even the best of
American intentions, whether in Iraq or New Orleans. Unchecked, it promises
greater disasters to come. As recently as 10 days
ago, when he resigned before his arrest, Mr. Safavian was the man who set
purchasing policy for the entire federal government, including that related to
Hurricane Katrina relief. The White House might as well have appointed a
contestant from "The Apprentice." Before entering public
service, Mr. Safavian's main claim to fame was as a lobbyist whose clients
included Indian gaming interests and thuggish African regimes. Mr. Safavian now
faces charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff, the
Tom DeLay-Ralph Reed-Grover Norquist pal who is being investigated by more
agencies than looked into 9/11. Mr. Abramoff's greasy K Street
influence-peddling network makes the Warren Harding gang, which operated out of
its own infamous "little green house on K Street," look like selfless
stewards of the public good. You know that the
arrest of Mr. Safavian, one of three known Abramoff alumni to migrate into the
administration, is the start of something big. Alberto Gonzales's Justice
Department announced it only after Mr. Safavian had appeared in court and had
been released without bail. The gambit was clearly intended to keep the story
off television, and it worked. It won't for long. The
Enron odor emanating from Mr. Safavian is of a piece with the rest of the
cronyism in the Katrina preparedness package. The handing off of FEMA from
President Bush's 2000 campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, to Mr. Allbaugh's even
less qualified buddy, Michael Brown, in 2003 is now notorious. (The two men
have been friends for 25 years but were not college roommates, as I wrote here
last week.) But that's only the
beginning: the placement of hacks like "Brownie" and Mr. Safavian in
crucial jobs hasn't been slowed one whit by what went down on their watch in
New Orleans. Witness the nomination
of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the
Homeland Security Department. Though the White House attacked the diplomat
Joseph Wilson for nepotism because he undertook a single pro bono intelligence
mission while his wife was at the C.I.A., it thought nothing of handing this
huge job to a nepotistic twofer: Ms. Myers is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers
and has just married the chief of staff for the homeland security secretary,
Michael Chertoff. Her qualifications for
running an agency with more than 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget
include serving as an associate counsel under Kenneth Starr; in that job, she
helped mastermind the costly and doomed prosecution of Susan McDougal, and was
outwitted at every turn by the defense lawyer Mark Geragos. Ms. Myers is only the
latest example of Mr. Chertoff's rolling the dice with Americans' safety during
his brief tenure in Homeland Security. After the bombings in London in July, he
vowed to maximize his department's "finite human and financial capital to
attain the optimal state of preparedness." Yet the very same day,
the president nominated Tracy Henke as Homeland Security's new executive
director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and
Preparedness. Ms. Henke, a John Ashcroft political appointee at the Justice
Department, has since been unmasked as an Enron-style spinner of numbers. As Eric Lichtblau of
The Times reported in August, it was she who ordered the highly regarded
nonpartisan head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Lawrence Greenfeld, to
delete a reference to politically embarrassing data in a government press
release for a report on racial profiling. When Mr. Greenfeld complained, he was
demoted. Imagine Ms. Henke, in
her Homeland Security job, having sway over press releases about our disaster
readiness. There is likely to be nothing but good news until it's too late. But
if the hiring of the likes of Ms. Henke, Ms. Myers and Mr. Safavian is half of
the equation in Enron governance, the other half is the punishing of veteran
civil servants like Mr. Greenfeld for doing their jobs honestly. Even as it fills its
ranks with Abramoff golf-junket partners, political flunkies and underemployed
relatives, the administration silences those who, like Sherron Watkins at Enron,
might blow the whistle on any Kozlowski or Ebbers or Rigas fleecing or
betraying the taxpayers. Three weeks before Mr.
Safavian's arrest, the Army Corps of Engineers demoted another procurement
official, Bunnatine
Greenhouse,
who was a 20-year veteran in her field. Her crime was not obstructing justice
but pursuing it by vehemently questioning irregularities in the awarding of
some $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq to the Halliburton subsidiary
Kellogg Brown & Root. Ms. Greenhouse and Mr.
Greenfeld are only two of the many whistle-blowers done in by this
administration so far. (Congressman Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, lists
nine on his Web site.) Even top government officials who are not
whistle-blowers, merely truth-tellers, are axed. Lawrence Lindsey, the
president's chief economic adviser, was pushed out after he accurately
projected the cost of the Iraq war at $100 billion to $200 billion. Gen. Eric Shinseki,
the Army chief of staff, was shunted aside after he accurately estimated the
number of required troops ("several hundred thousand") for securing
Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, who presented rosy scenarios of
getting the job done with Iraqi oil income and low troop deployments, stayed on
to bungle the war. Their errors were
compounded when the administration staffed the post-Saddam American occupation
with exactly the same kind of appointees it would later bring to homeland
security: the two heads of "private sector development" in Iraq were
a former Bush fund-raiser in Connecticut and a venture capitalist who just
happened to be Ari Fleischer's brother. As The Washington Post reported last
year, major roles in the L. Paul Bremer regime were given to 20-somethings with no foreign service
experience or knowledge of Arabic simply because they had posted their résumés at the
Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank where Mr. Bremer had
chaired a task force. The damage done to the
mission in Iraq and homeland security alike by Enron governance is
immeasurable. Administration apologists who now claim that hurricane relief
will bring still more examples of innovative, C.E.O.-style governmental
enterprise (Mr. Bush's "Gulf Opportunity Zone," for instance)
conveniently sidestep the harsh truth that such schemes are destined to be as
empty and corrupt as Andrew Fastow's Raptor partnerships at Enron once they're
staffed from the apparently infinite crony talent pool. YET it's not only the
administration that is to blame, any more than it is only the executives who
are at fault when a corporation rots. Culpability also belongs to the board
that rubber-stamps the shenanigans - to wit, Congress. Republicans in the
Senate are led by Bill Frist, who, in the grandest Enron manner, claimed last
week that it was to avoid a conflict of interest that his supposed "blind
trust" unloaded all of his holdings in a Frist family-founded company just
before its stock tanked. (Federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. are
investigating.) As for the Democrats,
they are nonpareil at posturing about the unstoppable nomination of John
Roberts - a conservative, to be sure, but the rare Bush nominee who seems both
qualified for his job and unsullied by ethical blemishes. Yet when David
Safavian was up for a job involving hundreds of billions of dollars, and much
of his dubious résumé was fully known, he was approved by the ranking Democrat,
Joe Lieberman, and all his colleagues of both parties on the Governmental
Affairs Committee. Which is to say that the rest of us, the
individual shareholders in government who have voted in our Enron-era
politicians, are responsible, too. Related: Dowd: Message:
I Can’t There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's
out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to
comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some
"quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about
trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do
spirit." Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the
Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important
jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that. The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no
experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's
Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have
already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian
administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill. Mr. Bush's "Who's Your Daddy?" bravura - blowing off
the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been
slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/092105M.shtml Historians vs GW Bush: in
an unscientific, informal survey, 8 in 10 historians rated the Bush presidency
a failure. The second most common response from
historians, trailing only Nixon, was that the current presidency is the worst
in American history. A few examples will serve to provide the flavor of such
condemnations: §
“Although previous presidents have led
the nation into ill-advised wars, no predecessor managed to turn America into
an unprovoked aggressor. No predecessor so thoroughly managed to confirm the
impressions of those who already hated America. No predecessor so effectively
convinced such a wide range of world opinion that America is an imperialist
threat to world peace. I don 't think that you can do much worse than that.” §
“George W. Bush's presidency is the
pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world
peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of
the planet. The worst president ever? Let history judge him.” §
“This president is unique in his
failures.” §
“That abuse of the patriotism and trust
of the American people is even worse than everything else this president has
done and that fact alone might be sufficient to explain the depth of the
hostility with which so many historians view George W. Bush. Contrary to the
conservative stereotype of academics as anti-American, the reasons that many
historians cited for seeing the Bush presidency as a disaster revolve around
their perception that he is undermining traditional American practices and
values. As one patriotic historian put it, “I think his presidency has been the
worst disaster to hit the United States and is bringing our beloved country to
financial, economic, and social disaster.” http://hnn.us/articles/5019.html |
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