[Mb-civic] Bush's Incompetent Criminals

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Bush's Incompetent Criminals
Russ Baker
March 17, 2006

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/17/bushs_incompetent_crim
inals.php

Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker  is a longtime 
contributor to TomPaine.com. He is also  the founder of the Real News 
Project, a new not-for-profit investigative journalism outlet. He can be 
reached at russ at russbaker.com.

Did you hear the one about the president’s top domestic policy 
adviser? Tired of helping the president pick the pockets of the poor 
and middle class on behalf of the rich, he found a more profitable 
target. Or Target, actually.

Last week, Claude Allen was arrested and charged with a scheme to 
rip off Target and other stores by "returning" more than $5,000 worth of 
merchandise he had allegedly never paid for in the first place. 
According to police, Allen would buy an item and put it in his car, then 
return and bring an identical item from the store shelves for a refund 
based on the original receipt. 

Apparently, the White House had an inkling what was coming. Back on 
Feb 9, it announced that Allen was resigning in order to “spend more 
time with his family”—a bromide that any savvy observer should know 
masks something more serious. In a statement, Bush declared:  
"Claude Allen has been a trusted advisor since 2001 ... Claude is a 
good and compassionate man, and he has my deep respect and my 
gratitude. "

Behind this sad incident lurk two interrelated calamities of the Bush 
years: the continuing placement of the dubiously-qualified in high 
positions, and the use of people of color as window dressing for 
policies that harm communities of color. 

Before Allen’s unique shopping habits were revealed, it was already 
becoming apparent that departments and agencies throughout the 
administration were jammed with incompetents and unfortunates who, 
based on relevant experience or temperament or values, shouldn’t be 
there at all  (see “Appointees Guarding the Henhouse ").

One colleague previously hauled off to face justice is David Safavian, 
the head of the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy—a 
former lobbyist and Hill staffer with scant experience in issuing federal 
contracts prior to his hiring by the Bush Administration, who was 
arrested in connection with the sprawling lobbying corruption scandal. 
Both Safavian and Allen will be on the docket in April.

In distancing the administration from Allen, unnamed White House 
sources insisted to reporters that, notwithstanding his title, it was never 
Allen who made domestic policy decisions; he was a merely 
ceremonial nobody. No, they said, it was former direct mail king Karl 
Rove—a man who believes that ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ are 
synonymous—who made all the policy decisions, while the ceremonial 
black guy actually just pushed paper. And that’s their spin, for 
goodness’ sake.

I’m apparently not alone in thinking that the brain center itself is looking 
especially grim these days. Of late, leading Republicans have begun 
advising Bush to get some "experienced" people into the White 
House—raising doubts even about Chief of Staff Andrew Card. And 
he’s probably the most qualified of the lot. Of course, experience can 
go hand in hand with chicanery: Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff 
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, qualified through long years of public—or at 
least party—service, has been arrested and charged with a serious 
crime: obstructing the investigation in the Valerie Plame leak 
investigation.

The process of distancing Allen from the administration is striking 
because, although nobody ever heard of him, he was the top-ranking 
African-American on the White House staff, and constantly at Bush's 
side both at White House events and on trips around the country.  
Claude Allen was like that one black in a suit stuck in every corporate 
group photo to represent a non-existent diversity. Doubt that? Even 
after Allen first told the White House about his little pick-up problem, 
he still was Laura Bush’s guest in her box at the State of the Union 
address. Why? Was he Laura’s good friend?

Sometimes, as with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the “nobody” 
routine means the exact opposite—that the miscreant was actually a 
major player. But Claude Allen was just an empty suit, a black pawn 
drafted to provide Bush with cover for all manner of regressive 
acts—starting with cutbacks to essential services, passing through tax 
cuts for the wealthiest Americans and culminating in efforts to open 
minority scholarship programs to whites.

The Claude Allen story also is important in giving the lie once again to 
the GOP’s claim of moral superiority. In an interview before he got in 
hot water, Allen explained why, having been raised a Democrat, he 
had switched parties. "I realized after the fact that I agree more with 
the Republican Party platform, that it talked about independence, that it 
talked about individual responsibility, individual rights, it talked about 
the ability to guarantee opportunities, not outcomes," he said.

That interview, fittingly, was conducted by Armstrong 
Williams—another African American who was well-rewarded for 
backing an administration that has done everything possible to make 
life more difficult for others of their race.  "It is a small circle of 
conservatives, especially when you are black," Williams would tell The 
New York Times. And what a circle: Williams was widely shellacked 
after it was disclosed that he’s been paid handsomely by the Bush 
administration to swoon over it in his newspaper columns.

And Allen presumed to speak of “individual responsibility.” Perhaps the 
Target situation would make a convenient point to bury that term 
forever, since it is hardly ever honestly employed, anyway.

Routinely described as born-again and a “devoted father,” Allen liked 
to talk about how his religious upbringing was a key factor in his steady 
march from a poor home to the pinnacle. Along the way, he befriended 
or worked for such advocates of color-blindness as the former senator 
Jesse Helms—one of the last of a generation recalling the days of 
segregation with fondness—and Supreme Court Justice Clarence 
Thomas, known for biting the affirmative-action hand that gave him a 
leg up. Allen lunched often with Thomas, who apparently lectured him 
on propriety.  "He would always say to make sure I conducted myself 
appropriately," Allen told an interviewer.

Now that Allen has failed the "appropriateness" test, the administration 
has quickly washed its hands of him—with the general acquiescence 
of the press and the punditocracy, a woefully common scenario these 
past five years.

But, a few facts: Allen was on the highest White House pay scale, 
earning $161,000 a year, and had bought a $958,300 house the same 
month he allegedly began stealing. According to Newsweek, he was 
considered by fellow staffers to be “a bit stuffy and holier-than-thou.”  
Allen, who had clerked for a federal judge, went on to serve as the 
Health and Human Services secretary for Virginia, where according to 
the Los Angeles Times, he gained conservative credentials by denying 
a low-income rape victim Medicaid funds for an abortion.

Such a record apparently endeared him to the incoming Bush team, 
and in 2001, he was appointed to the No. 2 post at the U.S. 
Department of Health and Human Services. There he promoted 
abstinence-only AIDS-prevention programs. By 2003, despite slim 
legal credentials, Bush proposed Allen for a seat on the federal 
appeals court, though Democrats blocked his nomination. Apparently, 
Allen had once remarked that an opponent of his boss, Jesse Helms, 
was connected to “queers.” Explaining himself at his confirmation 
hearings, he told senators that by “queers” he meant people who were 
"odd, out of the ordinary." In 2005, he was brought to the White House.

Claude Allen returned lots of items to Target because, ostensibly, they 
weren’t up to snuff. He was actually perfectly happy with the items he 
is said to have improperly procured. The rest of us are left thinking 
about how to return to sender something bigger, something many of us 
never ordered in the first place, and which has turned into the worst 
kind of damaged goods: an entire administration rotten to the core.


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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