Be fair and balanced.
Privatization Kills
More on Walter Reed from Government Executive:
During a Monday hearing to investigate widely publicized problems at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, lawmakers and Army officials placed partial blame on a public-private job competition that sapped the facility of workers, and on uncertainty about the slated closure of the center in the ongoing Base Realignment and Closure process.
Several lawmakers questioned whether it had been a mistake to outsource base operations support through a competition conducted under the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-76 rules. The Walter Reed competition began in January 2000 and went through numerous protests and appeals. The contractor selected to perform the work, Cape Canaveral, Fla.-based IAP Worldwide Services, finally took over operations on Feb. 4 of this year.
“We certainly could have done it better, and maybe we shouldn’t have done it at all,” said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the head of the Army Medical Command and Walter Reed’s commander from 2002 to 2004, in response to a question from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.
Call it unfair to accuse this administration of not caring about the troops. Sure, everybody cares to some degree. There aren’t that many psychopaths on Earth. Let’s stipulate that the administration cares deeply, for all the good that has done. The problem is that people in important positions care about conservative ideology one degree more than literally anything else.
I will illustrate the point with a different example. Nobody would sensibly claim that the administration doesn’t care about Iraq. Quite the contrary. The president’s strongest supporters and his worst critics alike will tell you that nothing has mattered more than overthrowing Saddam Hussein. For better or worse (depending, natch, on who you ask) rebuilding the middle east via Iraq constitutes this administration’s signature issue and the fundamental test that will decide whether the Bush presidency is judged a success or a failure. In that sense Iraq is the ultimate test of whether there exists a policy so important and favored that its executors will choose pragmatic leadership over ideology.
Surprise! Ideology won.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.
Let this sink in for a moment. Iraq, the singular focus of this administration’s obsessive attention, was run in such a way as to practically guarantee failure. Successfully doing the job unambiguously ranked lower on the priority list than preserving the maximum possible ideological purity. Taking that into account, the question of whether the administration cares about rebuilding Iraq proved totally irrelevant. They obviously cared quite a lot. But one thing will always matter more.
Again. Recall the encounter that spawned the term reality-based community.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It’s the same story every time. Important figures in our government earnestly believe that they can override objective reality through force of will and use of force. This same victory of doctrine over responsible management ensured the eventual failure of Communism. At every point in the hierarchy bureaucrats who served the Party Doctrine earned greater rewards than civil servants who did the job swiftly and efficiently. Now, as the worst news day yet shudders to a close, it seems clear that our conservative movement has doomed itself to the same fate.
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I. Lewis Libby Guilty On Four Counts Out Of Five
Give Firedoglake’s servers a break and head over to this thread at Kos. The Libby jury just handed down guilty verdicts on four out of the five charges against him.
As for what comes next, expect a pardon. The president has no personal stake in the next election and he could give a rat’s ass about public opinion. As for what would make him want to do it, I suspect that it means something that team Libby threatened to compel Cheney to testify and then reneged at the last minute. They didn’t put their own guy on the stand to defend himself. It almost seemed as if the defense didn’t care too deeply about winning.
We’ll see of course. But I suspect that justice for Scooter Libby will be short-lived.
I. Lewis Libby Guilty On Four Counts Out Of FivePost + Comments (121)
The Credibility Gap
A high-ranking Justice Department official told one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration that if any of them continued to criticize the administration for their ousters, previously undisclosed details about the reasons they were fired might be released, two of the ousted prosecutors told McClatchy Newspapers.
While the U.S. attorney who got the call regarded the tone of the conversation as congenial, not intimidating, the prosecutor nonetheless passed the message on to five other fired U.S. attorneys. One of them interpreted the reported comments by Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, as a threat.
Justice Department officials denied that the conversation with the U.S. attorney ever took place, and Elston said he called several of the fired U.S. attorneys but never made any such comments.
“I had no conversation in which I discussed with any U.S. attorney what they should or should not say to the media regarding their removal,” Elston said.
The two prosecutors who described the call demanded anonymity because, they said, they didn’t want to antagonize the Justice Department further.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse criticized McClatchy for running the story. “It is unfortunate that the press would choose to run an allegation from an anonymous source from a conversation that never took place,” he said.
If this was not the every day strategy of this administration, I might believe the notion this is a press conspiracy. But let’s face it- these guys politicized NASA and the FDA- does anyone think this sounds out of line?
The Department of Not Getting It
This is delicious. An open letter to CPAC is appearing on numerous conservative websites:
Ann Coulter used to serve the movement well. She was telegenic, intelligent, and witty. She was also fearless: saying provocative things to inspire deeper thought and cutting through the haze of competing information has its uses. But Coulter’s fearlessness has become an addiction to shock value. She draws attention to herself, rather than placing the spotlight on conservative ideas.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2006, Coulter referred to Iranians as “ragheads.” She is one of the most prominent women in the conservative movement; for her to employ such reckless language reinforces the stereotype that conservatives are racists.
At CPAC 2007 Coulter decided to turn up the volume by referring to John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator and current Presidential candidate, as a “faggot.” Such offensive language–and the cavalier attitude that lies behind it–is intolerable to us. It may be tolerated on liberal websites but not at the nation’s premier conservative gathering.
The legendary conservative thinker Richard Weaver wrote a book entitled Ideas Have Consequences. Rush Limbaugh has said again and again that “words mean things.” Both phrases apply to Coulter’s awful remarks.
They just don’t get it, do they? Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are the same visible, high profile, symptom of the problem with what is modern ‘conservatism.’ Throw in Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Dinesh D’Souza, and the rest, if you still don’t understand.
CPAC and the ‘conservatives’ can do their best to attempt to extricate themselves from the mess that is the current Republican party, but it is little more than a transparent run from the mess they, in large part, created. It was the self-styled ‘conservatives’ who pushed Terri Schiavo. It is the self-styled ‘conservatives’ who want to blame everything on immigration and liberals. It is the self-styled ‘conservatives’who use gay bashing and gay marriage as election year issues every year. It is the self-styled ‘conservatives’ who think supporting the troops means Purple Heart band-aids mocking John Kerry and claiming that “just a few bad apples” are responsible for the Abu Gharaib mess. All those things and more find ample support at the members of CPAC- look at the blogs who attended.
The problem isn’t that Ann Coulter said what she said- because in all honesty, the notion that saying an offensive word can get you into rehab is, in and of itself, pretty funny. Were it just a play on past political correctness, it would have been very humorous. But it wasn’t, and the reason her comments are a problem is that the majority of the ‘conservative’ movement is dominated by people who think there is something wrong with homosexuality and that there are few things worse than being a “faggot.”
And let’s be real. While some in the crowd were apprehensive when she made the remarks, perhaps recognizing the political difficulty this would create, a good number applauded. Ann Coulter is, at this point, a known quantity (especially after the raghead remarks last year), and she delivered what they knew she would deliver. Where were the complaints in advance of her appearance?
There were none that I am aware of, and this is just damage control. An open letter isn’t going to solve the real problem with the conservative movement. And hell, the authors can’t even write this letter without sniping at liberal websites. Ann Coulter is not the problem- she is a symptom of the problem.
Full disclosure- I used to like Coulter and still like reading Coulter in one sense- as a cranky SOB, I do enjoy people who manage to piss off that many people. It is Rush’s one good quality in my opinion. One good trait (in my opinion) does not, however, undo the damage they and those like them are doing and have done to our politics.
The Bigger Picture
While the current Walter Reed mess is at the feet of this current administration, I think it would be unwise to forget the larger, bigger picture, and that is that this is nothing new. In today’s WaPo, Dana Priest 9who should win a Pultizer for this series) notes that it is not just Walter Reed:
Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn’t know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.
“It is just not Walter Reed,” Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. “The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again.”
Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories — their own versions, not verified — of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.
I am not defending this administration’s doings in the current scandal, but the real scandal is that this has been going on for far too long. I have a friend whose brother was just discharged from the Marine Corps after developing debilitating diabetes over the years while he was in service(he dropped from 180 lbs to a little over 100). He can not function, will not be able to hold down a job due to his illness, yet the military has classified him as partially disabled so they do not have to pay full disability to him.
That is one among what I am sure are thousands of similar stories that you will hear over the next few weeks/months. it needs to be addressed, and e need to stop using up these soldiers, pretending we are taking care of them, and then turning a blind eye as they are treated like second class citizens.
We owe them more than a yellow ribbon on the car window.
*** Update ***
I missed this. Don’t read it if you have high blood pressure.
Another Free Market Victory
Raw Story has put together a compelling case that the failures at Walter Reed came in large part from an ideological drive to privatize government services.
“We have learned that in January 2006, Walter Reed awarded a five-year $120 million contract to a company called IAP Worldwide Services for base operations support services, including facilities management,” Waxman continues. “IAP is one of the companies that experienced problems delivering ice during the response to Hurricane Katrina.”
Waxman notes that IAP “is led by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official who testified before our Committee in July 2004 in defense of Halliburton’s exorbitant charges for fuel delivery and troop support in Iraq.”
Before the contract, over 300 federal employees provided facilities management services at Walter Reed, according to the memorandum, but that number dropped to less than 60 the day before IAP took over.
“Yet instead of hiring additional personnel, IAP apparently replaced the remaining 60 federal employees with only 50 IAP personnel,” Waxman writes.
[…] A year ago, the Government Accountability Office “dismissed a protest filed on behalf of employees at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, ruling that the employee group had no standing to challenge the outcome of a public-private job competition initiated prior to January 2005,” GovExec.com reported.
“The American Federation of Government Employees, which provided funding to back the protest, said the impetus to appeal came from Walter Reed managers who were disappointed to see how the competition process played out,” Jenny Mandel reported in February of 2006. “While the initial employee bid was $7 million less than that of IAP Worldwide Services, a mid-stream solicitation change resulted in a recalculation of the bids by all parties and in IAP’s bid coming in $7 million lower, said John Threlkeld, a lobbyist for AFGE.”
The article continues, “Threlkeld said the process for recalculating the employee bid was flawed, resulting in the inflation of the estimate that rendered it uncompetitive with IAP’s bid.”
On Saturday, the Army Times revealed that the Garibaldi memorandum cited by Waxman states that “the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002.”
Also read this excellent work at Unbossed. Still more information, some of it overlapping, can be found in informative Kos diaries here, here and here.
If this story proves accurate it will mostly be remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Literally everywhere you look in today’s government you see management that is not up to the job. I have talked about this before. The main issue is not privatization, at least not in isolation. The problem is that the administration’s rigid fixation on privatization for privatization’s sake discards even free-market principles like competitive bidding. In cases where private competitors can’t turn in a credible bid, managers simply change the rules until the private sector wins. Imposing quotas, real or implied, has that effect on people. Leave out any oversight mechanism to make sure that the job is done right, stifle whistleblowers and you have a near-perfect system for incentivized failure. Lift the hood on any Bush disaster and you’ll find more or less the same thing.
***Update***
Dana Priest is at it again. In tomorrow’s WaPo, the problem extends much farther than Walter Reed.
***Update 2***