Something seems to happen to otherwise reasonably competent and even honest public servants when they once enter the Bush White House: they become flaming partisans, they start lying even if they've never done so before, they turn into rabid ideologues, and they may even become corrupt. Take the case of AG Mike Mukasey.
Before Bush selected him to be the late but unlamented Gonzo's replacement, Mukasey had been a scorching thorn in Bush's legal side, refusing WH (through the Gonzo DOJ) arguments that "national security" justified trashing the Constitution and lying under oath about evidence that turned out to be either non-existant or hopelessly warped. He blasted them in no uncertain terms, and despite formidable pressure, especially from Bushies, protected the rights of defendants as long as he was on the bench. He took a lot of heat and he stood up to it.
Until he became AG, at which point this stalwart defender of law turned into a torture-defender and a proven liar.
This week, Mukasey responded to a letter he received from John Conyers and two other Subcommittee Chair in which Mukasey acknowledged (because he was forced to) that the call he claimed originated from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. was fictitious...
(emphasis added)
He made the damn thing up. Why? Because, as a now-loyal Bushie whose scruples have been effectively flushed down the loo, he saw it as his duty to defend the other lies Bush and His Babies have been telling about the FISA bill in an effort to get it passed so the telecom corpo's will be protected from prosecution for breaking the law for 6 years.
If it can happen to a man like Mukasey, who won't it happen to?
I ask this because Alphonso Jackson, the HUD Sec, has finally been caught with his hand dispensing cookies from the public jar and forced to resign. Bush has just named his replacement, and the guy seems, well, not unreasonable.
President Bush yesterday named Steven C. Preston as his new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, installing a well-regarded corporate and government administrator -- yet one with little experience in housing issues -- as his point person in dealing with the consequences of the subprime mortgage meltdown.
For the past 18 months, Preston has headed the Small Business Administration, where he upgraded an agency that had been criticized for its response to Hurricane Katrina. He came to government from a career in the private sector, most recently as executive vice president of ServiceMaster, the large home-cleaning and pest-control company.
Oh lawsie, another pest-control guy. The last one used a phony charity for crippled kids to raise campaign funds underneath the radar and was known as The Hammer for his, um, combative style of leadership.
The selection of Preston drew a mixed response. Those who have worked with him on small-business issues appeared impressed, with Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who chairs the Small Business Committee, declaring himself "sorry to see him go" from the Small Business Administration. "Mr. Preston inherited an agency in disarray, and he's worked hard to right its course," Kerry said in a statement.
Alright, so maybe he did OK at SBA. That's a totally different ballgame. We've got a looming disaster on our hands that's been created by the mortgage industry, a critical shoprtage of affordable housing that's been getting worse for the last 7 yrs, and hundreds of thousands of people still displaced from their homes after a storm 3 yrs ago. He might not have enough experience to cut all that, eh?
[C]onsumer advocates and some other housing experts appeared surprised by the selection. Howard Glaser, a consultant and former HUD official in the Clinton administration, predicted Preston would be a "caretaker" until the next administration arrives.
"Installing someone at HUD who continues to have no expertise in housing is a major flaw," he said. "We've gone through this entire crisis without any significant leadership from HUD, and it doesn't look like it's going to change."
But his experience - or lack of it - isn't really the problem. If his history is positive now, that's no guarantee that what made it positive will survive his first 5 minutes in the WH. Bush turns everything and everybody he touches into poison, like some sort of ideological Typhoid Mary. No one seems to escape unscathed. So does it really matter if Preston's a not-too-bad choice today if he becomes the housing version of Michael Mukasey a week after his appointment?
"Caretaker" may sound bad but maybe it's what we should hope for given the most likely alternative - another born-again ideologue without either conscience or ethics.
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