The Republican Guard

The last five years has seen the Bush administration and the Bush/Rove arm of the Republican party install political operatives, crony appointees and other political hacks in virtually every branch and agency within the federal bureaucracy. At this point, it is beginning to appear that there is very little that they have overlooked. From the Treasury Department, to emergency disaster management, to the State Department, to the EPA, to mining oversight to NASA, at this point, there is likely no agency at the federal level that does not have the taint of political hackery infesting it. Though this was known and sensed in smaller circles, the operation was widely exposed to the public during the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Bush's expedient, unqualified choice of Michael Brown to head FEMA proved more than embarrassing. It was, in fact, deadly.

Brown's actions in the immediate aftermath of the disaster was a pageant of blithe incompetence and mismanagement, wrapped in the guise of a PR effort, wherein he was simply advised to roll-up his sleeves in order to look "busy." Brown, it turned out, was actually more concerned about his dinner reservations than saving the lives of flood victims. But this was just an exposed tip of a very ugly and monstrous berg floating, submerged, throughout the federal government.

Other stories have to come to light recently that speak to the vast array of GOP operatives working in many facets of the federal government. The recent story about the attempted muffling of James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, revealed the efforts of a one George Deutsch who, it turns out, was an unqualified Bush appointee who had lied on his resume and has since resigned after being exposed as a charlatan. Interestingly enough, it was not the NY Times that exposed Deutsch but a blogger, Nick Anthis, who actually looked into Deutsch's claims and laid bare the man's falsified resume. The only salient aspect of Deutsch's background and the real reason for his ill-conceived appointment was that he was an intern for the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign, which is usually the only qualification a Bush administration appointee needs have. In one telling note to a NASA contractor developing web content, Deutsch wrote these fateful words:

The Big Bang is not proven fact; it is opinion. It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.

This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.

Here we see political agenda thrust to the fore as he explains that religion, not science, has primacy in Bush's version of NASA. Deutsch explicitly revealed that the only purpose of NASA, and science in general, is to affirm the beliefs of a segment of a population that the GOP has spent decades courting.

As a public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, Duetsch variously engaged himself by trying to keep a lid on discomfiting scientific opinion that was emanating from highly respected scientists regarding the mounting evidence of global warming and the long established Big Bang theory. Of course, such scientific postulation is entirely unacceptable to the Bush orthodoxy and the dutiful Deutsch had been placed in a strategic position to keep such noise makers under thumb. Even though Deutsch has now been dispatched, Hansen points out that the problem is much deeper:

He's only a bit player. The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about.

On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed. The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here.

An informed public is certainly nothing the Bush administration wants.

Hansen's above stated concern is exactly correct. The problem is much broader than one young GOP lackey at NASA headquarters.

Of a more immediate and dangerous nature than the subversion of global warming indicators are tales that can be found detailing the political machinations of Bush appointees within the State Department:

State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.

In fact, decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and other arms proliferation issues have walked out the State department door with the exodus of many experts in these fields. As readers might have expected, John Bolton, as Undersecretary of State, was the man at the centre of the expertise-loss program. Bolton has often conveyed a notorious distaste for treaties and international co-operation.This is, perhaps, the major reason why US "diplomacy" with Iran amounts to nothing more than thinly veiled threats of tactical nuclear weapons strikes against civilian nuclear facilities in that country. And the EU-3 appear more than ready to appease this posturing, after blindly rejecting the latest Iranian offer.

Aggressive posturing in the foreign arena has disenfranchised a great deal of the international community. Indeed, some of that appears to have rubbed off on the Europeans. Treaties and international law have been tossed on the scrap heap of history and with it, the tools of diplomacy and global good will This is something the United States can ill afford just as nuclear proliferation appears as a major concern for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the Bush administration, guided by the shaking fist of John Bolton, has purged the diplomatic ranks of the State department and instead filled the void with hapless, unqualified lackeys.

But the inculcation of politics in realms of governance is vast and the subversion of science, reasoned foreign policy, competent disaster management, sound environmental policy are only some facets of the machinations of the Bush/Rove machine. In what can only be regarded as role reversal of the usual lobbyist efforts on the Hill -- influencing government officials with political campaign favours -- the Bush team has used governmental positions occupied by cronies to garner political campaign favours.

During the 2004 presidential race, Bush sought to employ the support of the Vatican, specifically to attack Kerry, and he did so through his trusty appointed ambassador:

President Bush reportedly asked Vatican promote socially conservative values in the United States more aggressively -- a further sign that the Catholic Church and its members could play a key role in this year's presidential campaign.

Bush's papal meeting was brokered by the US Ambassador to the Vatican, Robert James Nicholson. Nicholson was a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Given Kerry's stance on civil unions and abortion rights, the implications of this attempt were hiding in plain sight. Though Pope John Paul II was an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, Bush really didn't visit the Pope in order that he might further digest contrary papal views on American foreign policy. But the meeting in Rome was quite successful as far as Bush's presidential campaign aspirations were concerned:Just hours before Sen. John Kerry was scheduled to discuss his support for legalized abortion at a large women's rights rally Friday in Washington, a top Vatican cardinal called on priests to deny communion to Catholic politicians like Kerry who take that stance.

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