Incompetence as a Strategy to Dismantle Government

It isn't just incompetence, although certainly the Bush administration is incompetent. This administration uses incompetence as a strategy for discrediting government. Dismantle government by appointing not the "best and the brightest" but the crony or the evangelical instead. Discredit government so that we can get rid of it.

Remember Michael Brown as the head of FEMA?

Remember Monica Goodling at the Department of Justice and her hiring based on religious beliefs and a degree from that bastion of excellence Regent University School of Law?

Last night I was speaking with a financial adviser who looked like she aged ten years in just the last few days. "I hope Paulson and the Federal Reserve know what they are doing," she confessed. She didn't exude confidence.

Looking at Sarah Palin, she appears to use the same strategy of governing: loyalty tests and cronism. It appears that she has appointed anyone to state office in Alaska who is still a friend from high school. Didn't Andrew Jackson try to end these practices when he created the civil service?

Yet since Bush took office many career professionals have evacuated the Department of Justice, State Department, Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, to name a few. The Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department used to be the place for the smartest young attorneys to post. Their responsibility was enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, probably the single most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted. However, after two presidential elections where caging and voter ID requirements have succeeded in disenfranchising thousands of potential Democratic voters--mostly African American, poor, new voters, and older ones-- clearly the Voting Rights Section has gone the way of the rest of the Bush administration: cronism and incompetence.

It's all strategic, and that is the shame.

The US Commission on Civil Rights, one would believe from the name, would be dedicated to monitoring and confronting the historic discrimination against African Americans. Instead, the Bush administration manipulated the appointment process and stacked the Commission with right wing ideologues who oppose all methods of correcting racial inequity. The current Commission is obsessed with ending all forms of race conscious admissions to colleges and professional schools even though the US Supreme Court permits such considerations. Now the Commission has hired Hans von Spakovsky as a consultant to oversee the upcoming presidential elections although von Spakovsky was not confirmed as a member of the Federal Election Commission because of his radical beliefs.

It's all strategic, and that is the shame.