The Talent at the Top

[Moses]

Resume of Cheney's Front Monkey:

EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION
Law Enforcement:

I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pleaded guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

Military:
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:
I ran for U.S. Congress and lost.

I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.

With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:
I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.

With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.

I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of *over one billion dollars per week*.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.
I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market.

In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I set the record for most campaign fundraising trips by a U.S. President.

I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.

One of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. History, Enron.

My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.
I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.
I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.
I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.

I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).

I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.

I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, preemptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community. I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in wartime.

In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.
I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD.

I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.

During the Iraq War and Occupation thousands of American troops were injured and killed. I did not have the time to attend any of the funerals for our fallen soldiers but I did have the time to attend more than 43 fundraising events of the Republican party.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.
All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for
public view.

All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

[Moses]

Honoring Failure
    By Sidney Blumenthal
    Salon.com

    Thursday 16 December 2004

How to run an imperial presidency: Reward those who have failed. Otherwise, the whole charade will be exposed.

    How President Bush will handle the vexing difficulties of imperial management has already become apparent in the early days since his reelection.

    For months the United Nations' oil-for-food program for Iraq has been a target of conservative media. The U.N. itself has appointed a commission headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to investigate past abuses. With the election over, the administration began its finger-pointing with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had called the invasion of Iraq "illegal." News was leaked that Annan's son had been a consultant to a company involved with the oil-for-food program, though Annan said he knew nothing about it. The outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, was sent out to declare that Annan's resignation was a live issue.

    The relevant facts about the program were pushed to the side. James Dobbins, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, wrote in the Washington Post: "American outrage over the diversion of U.N.-supervised Iraqi oil-for-food money seems to miss three salient points. First, no American funds were stolen. Second, no U.N. funds were stolen. Third, the oil-for-food program achieved its two objectives: providing food to the Iraqi people and preventing Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military threat to the region - and in particular from reconstituting his programs for weapons of mass destruction." But these calm points were far removed from the administration's objective.

    Then the Post reported that the United States was wiretapping Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, in an operation to discover whether he was secretly helping Iran hide its nuclear weapons program. In fact, ElBaradei was successfully working with the Europeans to negotiate a resolution with the Iranians. It was this diplomacy that neoconservatives within the administration were seeking to discredit. Compliance by Iran with internationally monitored nuclear development isn't the objective of the neocons; they want regime change, an Iraq redux. The Europeans can't be frontally attacked, so ElBaradei was put in the cross hairs. The techniques of the permanent campaign, especially negative attacks, recently applied in the reelection contest, are being transferred seamlessly and shamelessly to international relations.

    In part, the slash-and-smear campaign against Annan and ElBaradei is the Bush administration's effort to subjugate international civil servants and organizations to its central command. But this episode also reflects the rolling coup of the neocons as they struggle for power, position and policy in a second Bush term. Behind the scenes, they are scraping for new appointments in the national security apparatus. And in the wake of the catastrophe in Iraq, they are trying to foster a new conflict with Iran. Even Karl Rove, Bush's political strategist, plays in this arena, with his very own Iran advisor - Michael Ledeen, a sleazy operator on the fringes who was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal (in which even Oliver North suspected him of skimming money).

    At the least, the attacks on the United Nations serve as a political distraction from Iraq, where 178 U.S. soldiers have been killed since Bush's reelection. (The indispensability of the U.N. in arranging the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq goes unmentioned.) But America's front-line troops have not been distracted from the reality of carnage. On Dec. 8, they greeted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with blunt questions about the failure to provide sufficient armor for their vehicles. Rumsfeld replied: "As you know, you go to war with the army you have. They're not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." He added that the soldiers who were rigging their own armor might be killed anyway. "It's interesting ... if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up."

    Never before has a U.S. defense secretary been rebuked by the troops; never has a defense secretary insulted them. Two Republican mavericks, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Chuck Hagel, called for Rumsfeld's resignation, but they might as well have been whistling in the dark. Rumsfeld's disasters are Bush's. They are of such monumental dimensions that to lose Rumsfeld is to admit failure. Rumsfeld cannot be thrown overboard. It's better to blame the troops.

    On Tuesday, Bush gave out honors for failure with his bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tommy Franks, the former CentCom commander, who allowed Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora by not deploying U.S. troops to entrap him; George Tenet, the former CIA director, who jumped on the bandwagon for the Iraq war, enthusiastically informing Bush that the claims about weapons of mass destruction were "a slam-dunk"; and L. Paul Bremer, former chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who, among other blunders, disbanded the Iraqi army, clearing the path for chaos and violence. These awards are signs that failure will be celebrated as success.

    The farcical unraveling of the nomination of former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security further illuminates the administration's methods. The fact that Kerik neglected to pay taxes on a nanny who was an illegal immigrant was a most convenient alibi. Beyond his multiple extramarital affairs, secret marriage and love nests, Kerik appears also to be married to the mob - involved with members of the Gambino crime family. Yet Bush had been attracted to Kerik's Rambo-like aggression in the first place; the White House vetting process seems to be as credulous as the Mickey Mouse Club, and the impulse to cover up instant. The fall guy in this scenario is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Kerik's patron and partner. Inadvertently, Giuliani's tainting eliminates him as a moderate Republican pretender to the throne in the future. If only Kerik's foibles had passed beneath the radar, he might have been honored for any calamity. Thus the risks and rewards in Bush's imperial capital.

www.truthout.org/docs_04/121804E.shtml

[Moses]

The Cabinet of Incuriosities

By Ron Suskind

....Mr. Snow's prenuptial agreement, when he replaced the obstreperous Paul O'Neill two years ago, is similar to the ones his newly arrived (or at least newly promoted) second-term colleagues have just signed: all policies come from the White House. Read the script with ardor and good cheer.

As Mr. Bush learned in his first term, this is a difficult agreement for some of America's most accomplished people to sign. They may be publicly hailed for their innovation and decisiveness, but those qualities are rarely demanded in their cabinet jobs. Consequently, cabinet members often feel like imposters. This president's mission is to tame the unwieldy federal bureaucracy, not empower it.

One way he has done this is to weaken cabinet members themselves, often by allowing them to announce policies that he has then publicly repudiated - a tactic he used, for instance, with Secretary of State Colin Powell over administration policy toward North Korea. Not surprisingly, many traditional high achievers end up frustrated. Recruitment of others has proved difficult. The result is the second-term cabinet: an odd collection of quiet tacticians and loyal friends.

This has significant implications in how the government is run - and the Treasury Department offers a glimpse of what other parts of the executive branch are fast becoming. Just as a White House is defined by its president, departments were often reflections of their secretaries. Over the past two years, Treasury - like state under Mr. Powell - has become a neutered giant, looking for direction from an often distracted or otherwise engaged White House. Meanwhile, the policy arms of entire parts of the government have been withering as career staffers leave for jobs where they can at least use their expertise and training.

Mr. Bush's style of top-down management means that cabinet departments are no longer reflections of their secretaries but of the president himself - or, more precisely, his will. It's a system that many corporate chief executives would envy (or certainly did in the 1970's, when Mr. Bush was at Harvard Business School), and it just may be Mr. Bush's most significant legacy.

Yet such an arrangement creates its own set of problems, especially in the public sector. Mr. Snow, for example, after two years traveling the nation and world promoting the president's policies, was suddenly seen as inadequate in the post-election glow. The centerpieces of the president's second term - Social Security reform and an overhaul of the tax code - would both require the support of a cabinet secretary who was more than a mere mouthpiece.

Mr. Snow, though he is a former chief executive and has a doctorate in economics, was not considered to be up to the task of guiding two of the most ambitious domestic policy proposals in decades through Congress and Wall Street. Unattributed quotations to this effect began to leak from the White House, and names of possible replacements made headlines. Mr. Snow was cast adrift, rescued only when some of the more prominent names let it be known they were not interested in his job.

The unspoken concern at the center of this episode: maybe loyalty is not enough. Maybe the president needs to vest his authority in someone who can actually help sail the ship of state on these two initiatives, someone with autonomous and irrefutable credibility in areas where the president - electoral mandates notwithstanding - could use a boost.

The president, affirming Mr. Snow, has decided otherwise. Power, as Mr. Bush sees it, justifies itself. No boost required. It is undercut, in fact, by even a reasonable expression of need.

....Whatever the roots of Mr. Bush's overriding devotion to loyalty, it partly stems from his disdain for the concerns of old-style meritocrats, the kind of people who wince when the president places his confidence in someone like Mr. Kerik. Mr. Bush has never been comfortable in America's so-called meritocracy. Undistinguished in college, business school and in the private sector, he spent nearly 30 years sitting in seminar rooms and corporate suites while experts and high achievers held forth.


....History will judge whether his actions are visionary or reckless. In the meantime, he is applying his intensely personal method for judging merit to pick a group of largely no-name cabinet officials for his triumphal second term. ....

But even well-known cabinet appointees like Condoleezza Rice, a respected but inexperienced national security adviser, and Alberto Gonzales, a reverential and competent White House lawyer, have few credentials more important than the trust and confidence of Mr. Bush. Mr. Snow, though undistinguished in leading a shrunken Treasury Department, will now shepherd Social Security and tax reform as the president's top domestic appointee. Michael Leavitt, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is already vetted and shifts easily to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Margaret Spellings, the president's longtime Texas confidant, moves to the Department of Education despite often being overwhelmed as head of the Domestic Policy Council. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - a surviving first-term heavyweight, who may have worked too hard telling Mr. Bush what he wanted to hear - is increasingly left with only the president's trust and confidence as thin armor.

Now that Mr. Bush has won his final campaign and holds high a gleaming national mandate, he can be ever more himself. And for Mr. Bush, personality is destiny. What you do is not as important as whether you are deemed morally sound and trustworthy. In other words, a "good" man - or woman - beats a leading expert every time. Welcome to the new meritocracy.


Ron Suskind is the author of "The Price of Loyalty."

[karpomrx]

Hitler filled posts with the mediocre, basing their ranks upon loyalty more than ability. This led to a situation where little could be done without the Supremo's O.K.
If the destruction of the federal system is the goal, this is the way to do it.

[Moses]

Life of Bush: Timeline

[Moses]

When Democracy Failed - 2005: The Warnings of History

by Thom Hartmann

The Warnings of History

This weekend - February 27th - marks an important historical anniversary. One that the corporate media is not likely to cover. The generation that experienced this history firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us dare hear their ghosts.

It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer - a London Daily Express reporter on the scene - say they certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.

Playing on this new implicitly racial nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.

He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at out disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and news reporters who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

He also reached out to the churches, declaring that the nation had clear Christian roots, that any nation that didn't openly support religion was morally bankrupt, and that his administration would openly and proudly provide both moral and financial support to initiatives based on faith to provide social services.

(rest at link)