Now that everyone's rep has been destroyed

For some time I have been harping on the idea that no one's reputation has survived the Bush Years, or the Double 'Aughts, so much so that I have become a broken record. But it reflects a bitter truth that I think we should be aware of. Now this loss of reputation, indeed of basic trust and respect, has spread throughout the entire system of our society.

Here is Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal:

I spoke to a Manhattan-based psychiatrist who said there is an uptick in the number of his patients reporting depression and anxiety. He believes part of the reason is that we're in a new place, that "When people move into a new home they increasingly recognize the importance of their previous environment." Our new home is postprosperity America; the old one was the abundance; we miss it. But he also detected a political dimension to his patients' anguish. He felt that many see our leaders as "selfish and dishonest," that "our institutions have been revealed as incompetent and undependable." People feel "unled, overwhelmed," the situation "seemingly unsalvageable." The net result? He thinks what he is seeing, within and without his practice, is a "psychological pandemic of fear" as to the future of things—of our country, and even of mankind.

This morning, as I drank the first cup of coffee, I read on the front page of the paper the bitter fulminations of a selection of Bernie Madoff's victims - they want his head on a platter.

So who's next?

The Deadenders

Apparently some members of the Bush administration have not gotten the grand gesture Bush himself is making in cooperating fully with the Obama transition team. The twit he put in at NASA for one (and let's hope only). From the Orlando Sentinel:

NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is “not qualified” to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

....

In addition, Griffin is scripting NASA employees and civilian contractors on what they can tell the transition team and has warned aerospace executives not to criticize the agency’s moon program, sources said.

Griffin’s resistance is part of a no-holds-barred effort to preserve the Constellation program, the delayed and over-budget moon rocket that is his signature project.

Like a scorpion, it stings while dying.

or is it something about Florida?

No rep left unblemished

The toxicity of the Bush years is simply amazing. So much so that I am not sure we can even lay all of the blame at the foot of the Bushies' mismanagement. (Not that I wouldn't be willing to try). Here's a squib from Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post.

Rebecca Christie and Matthew Benjamin write for Bloomberg about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: "[T]wo months before he leaves office, Paulson is a reduced figure, damaged by the financial-market meltdown that happened on his watch and by the government's struggles to respond to it.

"Like many others who have served in President George W. Bush's administration . . . Paulson, 62, will leave office casting a smaller shadow than when he arrived. . . .

And Chris Matthews seems to be setting up a countdown to when Scooter Libby will be pardoned.

No rep left unturned

Further evidence that no one's reputation survives the touch of the Bush administration: the Department of the Interior. I assume most of you are aware of the charges leveled at employees there, of the bribes and sex involved. Here is an editorial from the NY Times about it today. Not entirely an unbiased source, but the facts in it are backed up by news stories I have read elsewhere.

In three extraordinary reports delivered to Congress this week, Mr. Devaney [the Dept Inspector General] found that officials at the Minerals Management Service — the division responsible for granting offshore oil leases and collecting royalties — accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drugs and sex with oil company employees as part of what he described as a broader “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”

The Times conclusion is more politically charged, but it fits my thinking for some time about the Bush administration. After pointing out that the current Secretary of the Interior can take comfort from being exculpated by the report:

The White House can take no comfort at all. The people it brought to Washington to run the department had no interest in policing the oil, mining and agricultural interests they were sworn to regulate and every interest in promoting industry’s (and their own) good fortune. The most notorious of these was J. Steven Griles, a mining industry lobbyist who really ran the agency for four years and who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff scandal.

The Abramoff scandal just goes on and on. There still seem to be cases out there waiting for prosecution.

Fighting gov't waste by contracting it out

The waste, that is, not the government work (which for some odd reason citizens seem to like*). The mantra of conservatives has been for years that the private sector can do it quicker, cheaper and better. Having worked for the Feds and the state, as well as small businesses and a large corporation I can tell you that this is nonsense.

If you don't believe me, consider this column by the token liberal over on The Wall Street Journal. Here's a taste of it:

In the Bush era, the idea was pushed to a sort of extreme, with each of our great national initiatives – the Iraq occupation, Katrina reconstruction and the Department of Homeland Security – largely entrusted to private contractors. We now often read about federal employees quitting to work for private contractors to do the same job as before for twice** the pay. ...

One fact about government outsourcing is settled: It sure doesn't save money. A Washington Post reporter who scrutinized Katrina reconstruction contracts in 2006 found that "the difference between the job's actual price and the fee charged to taxpayers ranged from 40 percent to as high as 1,700 percent." To cover damaged roofs with tarps, certain contractors billed the government $1.50 per square foot of roof covered; some of the people who actually did the work got under 10 cents per square foot. Guess who kept the difference.

Privatization also constitutes a fundamental change in the constituency to which government answers. Journalist Tim Weiner estimates that, by 2006, about half of the people working for the CIA in Iraq and the National Counterterrorism Center were contractors, former CIA personnel accountable not to the American public but to their employers. "The spectacle of jumping ship in the middle of a war to make a killing was unremarkable in twenty-first century Washington," he writes in his book, "Legacy of Ashes." Among the CIA's new hires, he reported, the saying is, "Get in, get out, get paid."

The best government money can buy. And willing to pay any price for it.*** Government funded services are provided to meet a perceived societal need and no matter how poorly it is done, that is the goal of the government entity in theory. The only goal of a private firm by necessity is to make money. As much as possible. If not, the company ceases to exist. That's it: you figure it out.

Stay Tuned: the next post will be a brilliant example of the effects of small, privatized government on the battlefield (in AD 1141)!

UPDATE: Carmen this morning is furious with Wall-Mart, for screwing up her prescriptions, and her local doctor's office for sloppy work and unresponsive service: having worked for the Feds for 25 years she is walking around the house muttering about those idiots who think private industry is more efficient than government workers. She has a point. My point, in fact.

*Remember the government shut-down in the Clinton years? Repubs like Phil Graham were crowing about it until they realized that it was REALLY pissing people off. Then they tried to blame it on the Demos.

**For ex-military hired as mercenaries in Iraq the multiple is many times twice. See, among others, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an infuriating and depressing read.

***How this is going to play with the OTHER great conservative mantra, "Lower taxes means more tax revenue" we shall leave to our children and grandchildren to deal with.

Iraq and an academic fiasco

Only my high respect for the decision making process in high ranking academic hires causes me to believe every word of this story: the America University of Iraq hired its chancellor without even checking out his past employment record:

The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East.

Well, he did last a whole four months at that Arizona job (which, btw, paid $180k per annum).

I won't go into the nature of the scandal, since you can read them here. As for the mind numbing stupidity of the original hire as chancellor at Northern Arizona U, check this out.

I'll content myself with Cargol's own assessment of himself:

"I have overcome most, if not all, of my inhibitions and self-doubts. For sure, I am a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-han, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy. I am optimistic, outgoing, physical, affectionate ... and sensual kind of guy.

I have said it over and over: anyone, and I mean any.one., who comes within the baleful shadow of the Bush administration ends up looking like a fool if not actively malevolent.


Well, there is an opening for a university administrator in Kurdistan if anyone is interested. I'd apply myself except that I don't think I can talk Carmen into living in an Islamic country in the middle of a civil war. And, I might not be what they are looking for anyway.

Why we attacked Iraq

Ever wonder why it was in our vital national interests to invade Iraq? Well, wonder no more. Here is one of the chief architects of that invasion explaining it all and pointing out that, in fact, it was a good idea after all.

It is, of course, not his fault that the people interviewing him clearly are stunned at his argument. Nor that 72% of the American people don't buy it either. And I for one do not believe that he is, as Josh Marshall claims, "the stupidest guy on earth."

That would be the guy who hired him.

And, of course, the Bush State Department

The same clowns who caused so much emotional and financial pain to 20 some American families by refusing to let them bring their legally adopted children home from Vietnam are malicious bumblers on other fronts too. Remember the let's-all-look-at-passport-files for all three presidential candidates scandal? The one the State Dept and Condi Rice all swore up and down was only the result of some idle curiosity on the part of non-DOS contract employees?

Late breaking news implies this is another example of DOS bafflefarp and bullwhaaa:

The department intends to name a new acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services to replace Ann Barrett who will be stepping aside.

The official declined to offer an explanation as to why Barrett is being replaced, but the timing comes in the midst of a State Department Inspector General investigation into the passport breaches.

Call me suspicious, but why do I think that she was fired? For good reason?


These clowns have to go.

Bush's Pentagon in action

The Pentagon seems to have some big problems on its plate but never fault them for lack of attention to detail. Here they are cleaning up the Wikipedia entry of one of our fallen heroes. You know, the ones the Bush administration has so much respect for.

China: Once again Number One in the World!

Yes, in yet another sign of becoming a manufacturing powerhouse China pulls ahead of the rest of the world in a key indicator. Here is the news story.

The Bush Administration is again embarrassed to see the United States fall behind China. Many observers fault the Administration for failing to keep pace with China in this important benchmark of modernization.


Not that they didn't try.


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The Dept of State - bumbling clowns

That is, for personal reasons involving the adoption of my grandson, about the mildest thing I can think to call them. After watching how the State Dept carried out a political agenda to screw hapless American citizens, proved absolutely unresponsive until forced to correct the mistake, and then lied about it, and continues to come up with fresh lies about it, the following news story on Talking Points Memo about how Dept of State employees checked into Obama, Clinton, and McCain's passport records makes perfect sense. It certainly sounds familiar: the same suspect behavior, the same secrecy as to who was doing what, the same contempt for transparency, and above all, the start of the same lies to cover their ass.

This comment from a reader of the above linked story seems to have it about right:

-Mismanagement. You’ll recall that the whole US passport program was in disarray at the end of 2007 because the Bush Administration failed to plan for the Canada-Mexico-Carribean travel changes. Waits were stretching on for months. It’s possible these offending contractors may have been brought in to fill the gaps that the Bush Administration allowed to happen.

-Mismanagement II. You’ll also recall that Condi Rice refuses to take even symbolic responsibility for the day-to-day management of State. Blackwater contract? US Embassy in Baghdad? Contractor fraud? Cookie Krnogard? (A Relevant Article from the Post)

-Cover Up. Someone at State knew and didn’t report it up the chain. If a system was installed to track this information, then surely SOMEONE thought it to be important. So where did the info stop, or who suppressed it and why?

I may hold my nose if necessary to vote for anybody the now clinically deranged Democratic Party can put up for President so I can be sure that clowns like this are purged from the ranks of the federal bureaucracy, once the wonder and envy of the world. At least for those of us who knew something about the workings of bureaucracies.

Conservatives and the Surveillance State

Nothing about the Bush admin has struck as more peculiar, nor more disturbing, than the Republican Party (and conservatives in general) embracing an unregulated surveillance state in the name of national security. We are at war, they justify, and the war on terrorism, like McCain's war in Iraq, can last for a hundred years. A permanent state of war. But then, war is peace, dictatorship is democracy, and dumb is smart thanks to our increasingly Orwellian political discourse.

Glenn Greenwald, who is sometimes just too much for me, manages to express the dangers of this here on Salon.com when he examines the implications of contract employees accessing Barak Obama's passport application. Such records as, or course, are deeply private*.

The domestic spying arm of the U.S. Government has grown steadily over the last several decades but has exploded since 9/11. Virtually all imaginable categories of invasive information about the private lives of innocent Americans -- from telephone calls and email correspondence to health and prescription records and even the most innocuous incidents -- are now collected and stored in digital dossiers by the U.S. Government and are accessible to untold numbers of public and private employees. This explosion in domestic surveillance has been accompanied by the patently foolish assumption that government officials are so well-intentioned, honorable and interested in using this data only for our own Good that we can trust them to compile and use it without external checks -- such as judicial warrants -- because the danger of abuse is so low.

Look carefully at the words I have emphasised because that is exactly the way the policy is sold. How can any genuine conservative believe this? How can any genuine conservative embrace the resulting policy?

For that matter, how can any Republican be comfortable with constructing this surveillance state and handing it over to President Hillary Clinton? Or any other liberal who actually believes that the State is good and always knows best? As Julian Sanchez of the Los Angeles Times has noted,

Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can -- and repeatedly have -- abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters. . . .

But it is done by the Federal government, which has only your best interests at heart. So sleep tight tonight, knowing that your government is patiently at sifting through your records, keeping us safe from 6 month old Vietnamese babies, and answering the phone at 3am, all to keep you safe.


* as a former Social Security employee I can tell you exactly what a crock this is.

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Mickey is free at last!

Our little friend Mickey, late of Vietnam, is now home perched on the Appalachian ridge at Deep Gap, overlooking most of North Carolina, with his big sister Máeráed. He is a newly minted American, no thanks to the US State Department. Pretty much the whole sorry story is in the local paper here.

You will notice that while saner heads in Washington approved the granting of a visa to young Mickey, the good folks at the American Embassy in Hanoi simply refused to accept being overruled.

The Deep Gap couple had already successfully rebutted a State Department challenge to their visa request and had to wait for this successful conclusion to a second challenge from the State Department. Although the State Department, through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, recommended revocation of the petition for the visa, U.S. Immigration had the final word.

This would seem to indicate that somebody at the Embassy had a personal stake in denying exit visas for twenty-six American families, thus screwing up their lives and costing them tens of thousands of dollars. For what? To prove some folks in the US government don't like doing business with the Vietnamese? Some other reason?

It was not a good faith argument in any case. Consider this:

The U.S. State Department is concerned about baby trafficking and initially demanded further proof that Mickey had been abandoned to ensure that he fit the legal definition of an orphan under U.S. law. The guard at the orphanage did not record Mickey as an abandoned child, but “[he] pointed out to both the U.S. investigators and to the Vietnamese law firm we hired that he is not required to record abandonments,” said Mary.

This is proof of how corrupted by bias the State Dept at Hanoi was in this case. When pressured, they produced the Vietnamese transcript of the interview with the orphanage guard and a translation into English.

Funny thing. The English transcript provided by the embassy did NOT include the clear statement in Vietnamese that he was NOT required to record abandonments. Since the embassy based its objection to Mickey solely on that one point, failing to translate the key sentence smacks of "cover our ass as usual."

If Máeráed's family had not had the resources to hire an investigator for themselves, and to have the transcript translated themselves, they never would have known this.

And there are 25 other families dealing with the same nightmare.

You're government at work. These clowns have to go.


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The Bush Years from the Inside

Michael Gerson, who was once speechwriter for George W. Bush has just written an interesting overview of the Bush years and it is not pretty.

First, the historical perspective since it is easy to forget just how high the Bushies were riding at the end of 2004:

The Republican Party, at that moment, was on a roll. Between 2000 and 2004, the president increased his total vote by 23 percent. Republicans in the House held their highest majority since 1946. It was the first time Republicans had controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress in back-to-back elections since the 1920s. One respected conservative commentator said that Republican hegemony in America was "expected to last for years, maybe decades."

Well, "decades" was a bit optimistic.

Now, however, things have changed:

In early 2008, by nearly every measure, the Republican Party is in trouble. Republicans in the House and Senate have been exiled from leadership and are retiring in large numbers. Fund-raising—the most tangible measure of enthusiasm—is weak. In the first three quarters of 2007, Democratic presidential candidates out-raised their Republican counterparts by $77 million. One adviser to a major Republican campaign recently complained to me that a significant number of wealthy donors on their fund-raising list were giving to … Barack Obama. Voter turnout on the Republican side in the early primaries has been weak compared with Democrats. And the party, well into the primary process, lacks a unifying candidate.

The cause of all this? Partly Bush, especially his (now) unpopular stand on the war in Iraq. But Gerson makes a good case for spreading the blame:

Then came the congressional losses of 2006, which were related to a sour public mood on Iraq—but only in part. Republican congressional leaders had assumed the same earmark-seeking and ethical corner-cutting image of their Democratic predecessors. The "bridge to nowhere" became a Republican symbol of waste and hypocrisy. Some conservatives tried to shift the blame to the president's "reckless spending" for the midterm defeats of 2006—conveniently forgetting that more than 15 Republican members of Congress had been implicated in sexual and financial scandals.

So much for the decades long triumph of conservatism and Republicanism. It still amazes me that the Republican candidates are generally running as Bush III. Well, I suppose it could work, if the Demos were dumb enough to nominate someone totally inept or unlikeable.

And they would not do that.

Clowns

"Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies."

Pathetic.

The above was quoted here. Click on it for the whole story.

Innocent! Innocent I tell you... uh....never mind

Remember White House Secretary Scott McClellan assured us that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had nothing to do with the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame? Well, now he is coming out with his memoirs ... and like a lot of memoirs about years in this White House, it makes for interesting reading.

From an excerpt posted on McClellan's publisher's Web site and discovered by Editor and Publisher:

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

"There was one problem. It was not true.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself."

Thank God these people restored trust in the White House after the Clinton years. But of course, it could be that McClellan doesn't know what he's talking about, just like Paul O'Neil' in his memoirs, The Price of Loyalty.


UPDATE: Well, after putting out that little tidbit for the world to see, the publisher now says that the obvious implication just ain't so. Read about it here.

The Money Vote and the Repubs

Most of us don't pay much attention to it, but there is a type of vote that takes place long before the actual elections and often determines the course of the election: the decision by people, businesses and organizations as to which candidate or party to support with money.

This time around it looks as if the money vote seems to be lopsidedly going towards the Democrats. Paul Krugman has a column on this that I think makes some interesting points. Here's one:

predictions that Mr. Rove and his disciples would succeed in creating a permanent Republican majority -- I have a whole bookshelf of volumes with titles like ''One Party Nation'' and ''Building Red America'' -- depended crucially on the assumption that the G.O.P. would have vastly more money than its opponents.

But something seems to have gone wrong:

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

That last sentence is telling, btw.

Krugman points out that much of this is simply driven by the polls (bad for the Republicans) and the weak field (worse for the Republicans). Who wants to spend money suuporting pols who aren't going to have the opportunity to return the favor? But there is also this:"disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years." What upsets corporate America is that the scandals usually are about no-name companies that came out of nowhere to earn juicy contracts for very suspicious reasons. It's one thing to tilt the playing field, it is another when the tilt is away from powerful established businesses.

And then there is this:

In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party -- not the other way around. ''The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,'' wrote Mr. Confessore, ''are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.''

But corporations weren't happy. According to The Politico, ''many C.E.O.'s'' used the term ''extortion'' to describe ''the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.''

I have never had much of a taste for Krugman: I don't understand economics well and his TV persona is a little odd, but this has the ring of truth. In some ways the K Street project has been a "catastrophic success" for the Republican.s

Medieval Times

No, that's not a newspaper, though it ought to be. Here's a quote from Joe Klein in Time Magazine that I wrote down months ago on a slip of paper. Found the slip of paper.

The House of Bush is a more elaborate feudal operation. There is a medieval quality to eternal advisers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice. You can picture them in velvet robes, whispering in the prince's ear, in a 15th century Venetian tableau. Their loyalty to the family is impeccable, which is what matters most to the Prince - more than the national interest, in some cases.

This is giving Medieval a bad rap - you will notice that his Venetian example is Renaissance if not Early Modern.

Good questions

Maureen Dowd is not one of my favorite commentators not because she is too liberal but because I have watched her flirt inanely with Charlie Rose once too often. Nevertheless she asks a good question today:

“Can we please get someone in charge who will stop whining that bin Laden is hiding in ‘harsh terrain,’ hunt him down and blast him forward to the Stone Age.?’

But she quotes one of El Prez’ own advisors about George’s obsession with having the Secret Service perfect his bike trails:

“What kind of male obsesses over his bike riding time, other than Lance Armstrong or a 12-year-old boy?’

Wish I had an answer to either one of these.


This post was written on my Neo word processor in a coffee shop this morning. I transferred it to my desktop and then to Sententiae. The first time I have used the Neo this way.

The "Decider" can't decide who decided

Or at least that seems to be the case for El Prez and the disbanding of the Iraqi army, now regarded as the single greatest blunder of the American occupation of Iraq. In an interview with biographer Robert Draper reported by the NYT Bush said “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president.” That's reassuring - it shows El Prez taking full responsibility for his policies, right or wrong. The "buck stops here" sort of attitude Americans like so much.

Then the effect is destroyed by this:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Keeping the army intact was the policy, but someone decided on their own to break that policy, and Bush "can't remember?" I have to admit that I have become inured to tales of the Bush admin's incompetancy but this set me back on my heels. I don't know much about administration, but I am pretty sure that if any subordinate of mine directly contravened my stated policy I would have his head on a platter.

And I would remember it.