One Thing Leads to Another

It's pretty amazing to read all about ultra-boob Brownie blaming everyone else (New Orleans' Mayor, Louisiana's governor, the press, the Department of Homeland Security for cutting his budget, etc., boo-hoo, woe is me) for FEMA's lame and deadly response to Katrina (the body count so far is over 1,000). But it's yet another instance of business as usual at Bush Inc.: they believe government is essentially bad and have little use for it, except as a means to reward and enrich loyal fundraisers and business cronies, and to dismantle any agency or law that prevents their buddies from making even more money. Check out Molly Ivins' column and wonder if any federal agency will function again once Bush Inc. leave office:

"There's a doctoral dissertation to be written about Bush appointees named during the administration's frequent fits of Petulant Pique. These PP appointments are made in the immortal childhood spirit of "nanny-nanny boo-boo, I'll show you." Susan Wood resigns [from the FDA] in protest over the politicization of women's health care? Ha! We'll show her -- we'll put a vet in charge, instead.

The PP appointments are less for reasons of ideology or even rewarding the politically faithful than just in the old nyeh-nyeh spirit. You could, for example, put any number of people at the Department of Labor who are wholly unsympathetic to the labor movement -- Bush has installed shoals of them already. But there is a certain arch, flippant malice to making Edwin Foulke assistant secretary in charge of the health and safety of workers.

Republican appointees who oppose the agencies to which they are assigned are a dime a dozen, but Foulke is a partner from the most notorious union-busting law firm in the country. What he does for a living is destroy the only organizations that care about workers' health and safety.

Here's another PP pick: put a timber industry lobbyist in as head of the Forest Service. How about a mining industry lobbyist who believes public lands are unconstitutional in charge of the public lands? Nice shot. A utility lobbyist who represented the worst air polluters in the country as head of the clean air division at the EPA? A laff riot. As head of the Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund regulations? Cute, cute, cute. A Monsanto lobbyist as No. 2 at the EPA. A lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute at the Council on Environmental Quality. And so on. And so forth.

The Federal Trade Commission was finally embarrassed enough by demands from Democratic governors to start an investigation into recent price gouging by oil companies. But the investigation will be headed by a former lawyer for ChevronTexaco. Is this fun or what? Nanny-nanny boo-boo."

Look what Bush Inc.'s arrogant and shortsighted the-ends-justify-our-means policies have wrought on our military -- we have U.S. soldiers snapping pictures of dead Iraqis and posting them on a website in exchange for access to porn, and reports that troops in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division were involved in severe and regular beatings of people suspected of being part of the Iraqi insurgency (even the cook could come by to work off some steam by pummelling a prisoner with a metal bat). (Prisoners are supposed to be guarded by Military Police, who are specifically trained in handling POWs -- not by regular troops, who are not, and who may be pissed at the POWs for killing their buddy in a firefight, etc.) Read the Human Rights Watch report and weep for what is done in our name.

And Karen Hughes, as she tours the Middle East in her quest to improve America's image in the Arab world, is supposedly genuinely surprised to find that women in Saudi Arabia are generally happy with their non-American way of life and angry about U.S. policies in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel/Palestine.

Amazing what happens when you leave the Bush bubble, isn't it?