Sunday, September 25, 2005
The Weasel's Dirty Sidekicks
In his NYT column today, Frank Rich lays out a pretty good case for doing some serious housecleaning at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and environs:
As Rich points out, The Weasel & Co. are not the only guilty parties in all these godawful appointments: Congressional Democrats have also proved themselves, for the most part, incapable of anything but rhetorical bluster -- going right ahead and voting for ludicrously ill-qualified nominees while swearing to the candidates' rank unsuitability.
In the calculus of Washington, perhaps such tradeoffs are imagined necessary in order later to accomplish some critical goal. The problem with this equation is that the Dems don't seem to have much luck getting Republican buy-in on any "critical goals" at all. (Well, I guess they can always point to successes of bipartisanship like the extended Daylight Saving Time amendment to the Energy Act of 2005.)
In Sunday-sermon terms, perhaps the Congressional Democrats need to be reminded that Jesus said merely to turn the other cheek; he did not add, "...and offer your own hand to assist in the slapping."
- David Safavian (about whose arrest I've already written)
- Michael Brown at FEMA (although yes, you may now cross him off the list)
- Julie Myers, "the new head of immigration and customs enforcement at the Homeland Security Department" and also niece of General John Myers, as well as recent bride of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's chief of staff:
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.
- Tracy Henke, "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.
- Meanwhile, in the GWOT (Iraq bureau):
...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.
As Rich points out, The Weasel & Co. are not the only guilty parties in all these godawful appointments: Congressional Democrats have also proved themselves, for the most part, incapable of anything but rhetorical bluster -- going right ahead and voting for ludicrously ill-qualified nominees while swearing to the candidates' rank unsuitability.
In the calculus of Washington, perhaps such tradeoffs are imagined necessary in order later to accomplish some critical goal. The problem with this equation is that the Dems don't seem to have much luck getting Republican buy-in on any "critical goals" at all. (Well, I guess they can always point to successes of bipartisanship like the extended Daylight Saving Time amendment to the Energy Act of 2005.)
In Sunday-sermon terms, perhaps the Congressional Democrats need to be reminded that Jesus said merely to turn the other cheek; he did not add, "...and offer your own hand to assist in the slapping."
