For a government that has no credible Congressional oversight and the greatest mania for secrecy since Nixon, the Bush administration sure seems to attract investigations. Steve Benen observes:
Following up on yesterday’s item about Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson and his apparent penchant for letting politics dictate the grant process, it looks like Bush’s cabinet secretary has a real problem on his hands.
[…] Today’s news looks much worse [link].* “During the investigation, Secretary JACKSON’s Chief of Staff, as well as the HUD Deputy Secretary testified that, in a senior staff meeting, JACKSON had advised senior staff, to the effect, that when considering discretionary contracts, they should be considering supporters of the President, language consistent with the remarks made by JACKSON in Dallas, Texas, on April 28, 2006.”
* “Investigation did disclose some problematic instances involving HUD contacts and cooperative agreement grants, in particular, the cooperative agreement award issued to Abt Associates…was blocked for a significant period of time due to Secretary JACKSON’s involvement and opposition to Abt. Secretary JACKSON’s Chief of Staff testified that one factor in JACKSON’s opposition to Abt was Abt’s political affiliation.”
* “Secretary JACKSON’s Chief of Staff also identified other instances of Secretary JACKSON intervening with contractors whom he did not like. Reviews of political contributions indicated these contractors had Democratic political affiliations.”
Given this, resignation shouldn’t even be open to debate. Jackson has to go.
Who would have guessed it. It isn’t like DC has a corruption problem or anything like that.
There is so much political corruption on Capitol Hill that the FBI has had to triple the number of squads investigating lobbyists, lawmakers and influence peddlers, the Daily News has learned.
Maybe this is an isolated bad apple? It seems like other than David Safavian and now Alfonso Jackson the Bush administration has remained fairly clean. I mean, if you don’t include Claude Allen and the George Deutsch loonies at NASA, or the underage sex problem at DHS, or the entire Department of the Interior. You also have to discount the corrupt MZM defense contracting and the problem of DoD-sponsored profiteering in general. If we can ignore that and maybe sweep Keith Tomlinson under the rug then yeah, this administration is overall pretty clean. Alphonso Jackson must be some kind of outlier.
Sarcasm aside, it should be obvious to everybody by now that this administration simply does not take governing very seriously. Look at two simple things – one, I rattled off that list above off of the top of my head. However well-informed I might be the real list runs a lot longer than that. Two, this is the criminal behavior that we find out about despite the best efforts of Congress. Imagine the stones that would turn over if the party with subpoena power actually cared enough about the country to make sure that it is being managed well.
The Other Steve
Hey now! I for one welcome our new discretionary spending overlords.
I’ve got this terrorist database I created with Microsoft Access, and I’m hoping to sell it to the Commerce Dept for $20 million.
I figure I just need to invest say $4,000 or so on a Republican’s reelection to get my bonus.
Punchy
I’m waiting for this whole Jackson thang to become a Racial Issue. As in, “you only want him fired b/c he’s Black!”, or some shit like that.
But why would he be fired for doing what the ENTIRE ADMINISTRATION not only encourages, but demands?
Davebo
Err…. But Cindy Sheehan!!!!
VidaLoca
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to be fired. And I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to resign either. Congress won’t demand his resignation and the Bushies are too feckless to care whether he stays or goes; their conception of government essentially boils down to nothing more than sucking the juice out of the lemon.
But wait, it gets worse. The damn Democrats don’t want to run a campaign on the war. They don’t want to run a campaign on the insousciant graft and corruption of the Republicans. They want, god bless them, to run on the economy
They’ve spent the summer looking high and low and they’ve finally found a way to walk away from taking leadership, taking responsibility, doing anything useful. If they win in November it will be in spite of their best efforts to lose. (h/t “Sadly, No”)
RSA
At least they haven’t shot anyone–oh, wait.
Pb
VidaLoca,
If that does turn out to be their strategy in 2006, then maybe they shouldn’t win, because if they do, they’ll get really hammered for the next two years, and 2008 will be a huge disaster.
We can’t afford another two years of the irresponsibly complicit Republican Congress, (indeed, we probably can’t afford the six we already had) but we *really* can’t afford another four years after that!
I think the best we can hope for at this point is two solid years of gridlock and squabbling, which really isn’t that good at all.
VidaLoca
No it’s not. It’s about the best we can realistically hope for though.
I had managed to suppress my natural pessimism enough to have some hopes that the Dems could take 1 House of Congress, and be in a position to block the worst of the legislative agenda (insofar as there is, in fact, an agenda) and lauch committee inquiries that could result in criminal charges for some of the worst of the “bad apples”.
If they do not take either house though, things get dramatically worse. Bush will take it as vindication of his administration and go forward unchecked. The so-called opposition party will be even less motivated to oppose than it is now, the Republicans will continue apace with raping what’s left of the government and the media will look the other way while raving about the eeevil “netroots”.
KCinDC
That’s Kenneth Tomlinson, not Keith. Let’s not accidentally besmirch a perfectly good first name.
Tom Grey - Liberty Dad
As long as the Dems offer no public strategy for winning the Long War, they will be weak on defense.
Cut and run, like in Vietnam, would result in thousands of Iraqis being killed, like anti-war success in Vietnam resulted in 600 000 being murdered.
If you don’t like cut and run, what policy DO you like?
As long as the Dems refuse to support American-led pro-democracy victory, most serious folk will keep supporting the Reps. Despite the corruption and the big gov’t giving favors to rich Rep supporters.
It wasn’t the Dems who led on the Porkbusting DB stuff.