The Disaster that was the Bush Administration - Chapter 287

Today’s edition touches on the tendency of the Bush Administration to confuse Long Term Public Interest with Narrow Short Term Partisan Interest.

A New Report presents yet another exmaple:

A report released Monday by the Justice Department's two watchdogs says the former head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division routinely violated federal law and department policy by using political and ideological affiliations in hiring several career attorneys.

Bradley Schlozman, the 67-page report says, actively recruited those he deemed "real Americans" -- members of the Federalist Society and others with conservative bona fides -- and in the process routinely overruled the judgments of his deputies on hiring issues.

[…]

While serving as interim U.S. Attorney in the Missouri's Western District in 2006 -- a position he had for a year -- Schlozman compared the assignment to his job in the Civil Rights Division, holding nothing back in a June 2006 e-mail to a friend.

"It has been months since I felt the need to scream with a blood-curdling cry at some commie, partisan subordinate," he wrote. "And I feel like the people I now work with are complete professionals. What a weird change."

He went on, "Granted, these changes are nice in many respects, but bitch-slapping a bunch of [Civil Rights Division] attorneys really did get the blood pumping."

This is not new information, just official confirmation of the tendency to prefer Narrow Partisan Interests over Public Interests.  

The Iraq Reconstruction staffing was handled in much the same way with political hacks with no expertise or life experience being placed in charge of building the Iraqi stock market and the like. What did ones stand on Roe v Wade have to do with executing a exit strategy? Everything, if you asked the Bush Administration. And meanwhile the government flounders.

Added all up, along with the partisan hacks staffing the EPA, this is just another example, why the Nation could not take another GOP administration after Bush’s Disastrous Reign of Error. 

Getting the government to function properly and staffed appropriately is reason enough alone to reject a third Bush term in the form of John McCain.  David Brooks had already posited that McCain would face a severe wingnut shortage when taking office.  The logical solution would have been to rely on the wingnuts in place.  That was an unacceptable risk.

If an Obama Administration can right the floundering ship of state that were the executive agencies of the government during the Bush Administration during his first term, I’ll consider it a success.