Two recent stories illustrate the glorious fruits of the Bush Doctrine.
* The Inspector General at CIA proves again why the administration cannot function when IG’s do their job. CIA IG John L. Helgerson got a little too curious about torture at CIA, so director Michael Hayden decided to investigate him. Will Helgerson investigate Hayden’s investigation? And if so, how will Hayden respond? Updates no doubt coming soon.
* Whodathunkit? If you create a huge voucher subsidy for private schools but free them from having to comply with government standards, you get a shoddy mess. Thinking about the children might be a cliche but yeesh, a little wouldn’t hurt.
No oversight, no accountability.
rachel
Yes, think of the children–or anything at all, for crissake!
Punchy
I did not know this, but am surely about to learn (from all-knowing Sean Hannity), that the entire GAO are liberal atheist pinkos with Bush Derangement Syndrome.
AND I hear that the CIA is opening up an investigation of the GAO. Perhaps the GAO IG will be investigated by the CIA IG, who’s under the CIA scope doing some CYA for the IG’s NIMBY investigation that’s about to disappear ASAP.
Zifnab
Just think, next time someone suggests “Let’s impliment student vouchers”, the public school supporters will have a screamingly huge scandal to point out as a reason not to go there.
pharniel
in michigan they made teh charter schools start taking the standardised tests…
they failed horribly, even compaired to romulus, romeo and detroit proper.
jcricket
As one of the commenters at Steve’s site pointed out, it won’t matter. Republicans are ideologically wed to the whole “government is the problem” theory. There’s never a situation where the appropriate solution is government-provided anything anymore.
They’re probably even fine with the whole outsourcing of our security and military to contractors like Blackwater thing (the one thing you think really should be done by the government, right?).
Tax Analyst
Yeah, because everyone knows that drunken, sneering, out-of-control cowboys with total immunity and no oversight at about $1,200 each per day are much superior at making sure things are properly and diplomatically handled in these types of situations than common military people. Lord knows how badly our National Interests would suffer if one of our prized diplomats, like say, Condi Rice on one of her many crucial visits to Iraq (like the one where she passed along “Tell him President Bush said to ‘Govern’ ” to Mr. Maliki) was not fully surrounded by these private industry buccanneers every step of the way. How would we ever carry on with our current surge “successes” if even an ingrown hair on her pimply-ass got harmed?
jcricket
Tax Analyst – It’s the whole “Republicans – the party that campaigns on the notion that the government is incompetent and then gets elected and proves it” thing.
Once you put cronies and asshats in charge of every government agency (and just de-fund the oversight agencies) you get to both screw everything up and then claim it was the government’s fault, so you should eliminate the government.
Grover Norquist couldn’t have planned it better himself.
The Populist
What is with these people and the hatred of objective oversight?
A democracy HAS to have independent oversight or else we fall into a nasty void of fascism.