Same old, same old
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A highway bill passed laced with pork. No big deal; happens all the time. An administration packed with cronies. Aw, the same way it's always been. Tom Delay in trouble? Yeah, well Bill Clinton was in trouble, Jim Wright was in trouble, Newt Gingrich got in trouble.
Excuse me, but I am here to officially declare war on the defeatist notion of "same as it's ever been."
Consider this a fatwah on the idea that corrupt and inept is accepted business as usual in Washington. Call it a jihad on the idea that they all do it. The lame notion that politicians are just doing what they have always done must die for any meaningful reforms to advance.
That's because while the nature of political corruption (abuse of power, inside dealing) has not changed, the scope has exploded. Teapot Dome or Boss Tweed would amount to rounding errors compared to Enron, MCI or some of the Halliburton / no-bid FEMA deals.
It is very important for the average citizen to realize it's not the same old same old -- it's far, far worse.
And there's plenty of evidence to prove it.
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The latest in a long series of examples can be found in the New Republic's story on the 15 biggest Bush Administration hacks. It's written in the pissy, sarcastic style that drives conservatives crazy, but sass aside, it's the larger point that's so important.
A deputy press secretary of no reknown becoming the chief of staff for a $6.3 billion budget. The press advance man now running a 1,800-employee government bureau operating in 80 countriies. The TV reporter turned advance man turned acting director of FEMA.
Plenty has been written about crony Michael Brown and his fantastic work at FEMA, and even more will be written about crony Harriet Miers moving to a lifetime Supreme Court job. But have you ever heard of Stewart Simonson? He's the country's point man on the impending bird flu pandemic, and in large part because of his inaction, Tamiflu vaccine deliveries in the U.S. have been delayed for a year. Is it leftist politics to note that he has no experience in epidemic studies whatsoever?
Consider the head of the Veterans Administration, a man who had to get extra money for Congress because he built his budget on prior year numbers -- and forgot to budget for casualties from the Iraq war! His credentials for such an important post? He raised $380 million dollars for Republicans from 1997 to 2000.
The New Republic used a formula for ranking its hackocracy -- closeness to Bush plus the stature of the job (read ability to do harm) divided by credentials. For the record, Michael Brown, the former head of the Arabian Horse Association turned FEMA disaster relief czar wasn't on the list. Too bad, as TNR put it, a city had to be destroyed before his cronyism was exposed.
The problem with blaming all this on President Bush, of course, is that all these cronies got approved by the Senate.
I'm not sure where's the bigger shame; Bush nominating the glad-handers, the Senate going along with it, or the people not even bothering to notice. It's not business as usual. It's out of hand and it's dangerous.
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Demoractic strategist Simon Rosenberg, I learned by reading the New York Times, describes the current split in the Democratic party as being between the governing wing (Hillary Clinton) and the activist wing (MoveOn.org).
As the love-child of Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean, I'd like to suggest to Mr. Rosenberg that there's a major difference in the activist wings of the two parties. Insiders on the right have succeeded in becoming corrupted by the system they rebelled against in '94. Their activism now concerns fat contracts, easy jobs and majority votes on sideshow issues such as assisted suicide or parental consent.
The activist wing of the Democratic party, it seems to me, is rather upset with everyone inside the Beltway, and I wonder if Democratic D.C. types appreciate just how tenuously they are attached.
Considering the Democrats complete lack of ideas, this is no surprise. Could we see the rise of an entirely new Progressive Party? Conventional wisdom says no, but look at where conventional wisdom has gotten us so far.
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Oct. 17, 2005
What's the bigger shame -- Bush nominating the glad-handers, the Senate going along with them, or the people not even bothering to notice?