Heritage provided the intellectual horsepower for the Bushies to politicize our government

while reading a jim hightower article reprinted in alternet, i was pointed to a 2001 heritage foundation report that contains these eye-opening points...

Career civil servants should not be tasked with formulating and executing the details of an agenda for major policy change. Political appointees, personally loyal to the President and fully committed to his policy agenda, are essential to his success...

[...]

The President needs a full cadre of personnel committed to him and his agenda in the federal agencies that execute the details of national policy.

• The new President must make liberal use of his power of appointment, get a loyal team in place to carry out his agenda, and insist on accountability while maintaining a clear distinction between career and non-career employees.

• Political appointments to key policymaking positions must be made in a timely fashion.

• Political appointees must be in charge of implementing the President's policies and readily available to speak for the Administration.

• Political appointees should make key management decisions; such decisions should not be delegated to the career bureaucracy.

robert moffit, the author of the report, calls this the "political administration model..." he continues with this caveat, the outcome of which has been evident from the earliest days of the bush administration, most recently on display in the justice department...

[T]he Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP) must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second, and that the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective. Picking appointees who are "best for the job" merely in terms of expert qualifications can be disastrous for an Administration genuinely committed to change, because the best qualified are already in the career positions and part of the status quo--the permanent government.

and so, political appointees, chosen above all else for their loyalty and frequently without any depth of expertise in the areas in which they are placed, end up overriding and overruling those who DO have the expertise in order to accomplish a political agenda... while this could conceivably be a good thing IF the ruling political administration was truly serving the common good of the nation, for a presidential administration with only two items on its agenda, power and money, it's an unmitigated disaster, not for those in power, of course, but for the country...

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"Getting blogs"

atrios offers a fairly lucid view...

Left of center blogs filled various connected vacuums which were created by a triangulating-against-itself-Democratic party, a media with a "no liberals on TV or radio" rule, and the post-9/11 media prostration to the Bush administration and its complete abdication of its responsibility with respect to the Iraq war, all of which followed its campaign 2000 prostration to the Bush candidacy. Overall what blogs have been able to do is create an unfolding political narrative which has been largely absent elsewhere. Sometimes it's about emphasizing different things, sometimes it's about combating DC conventional wisdom, sometimes it's about highlighting things which are being ignored. But taken all together it's about telling the story of politics in a different way.

While there are other elements - fundraising, various types of activism, etc... - day to day the power of the blogosphere is that it offers up a competing version of political reality, in opposition to the Russert/Matthews/Dowd version and in opposition to the Limbaugh/Hannity/Fox News/Heritage Foundation version.

speaking entirely for myself, yes, i do see myself offering up "a competing version of political reality..." however, even more than that, maintaining this blog day after day helps me keep a grasp on my OWN reality... the mere act of putting up a post requires me to visit, read, absorb, digest, and, via my own mental processes, regurgitate a spectrum of current events selected on the basis of what i believe to be the most meaningful in the context of today... i can't sit on the sidelines and pretend that i know what's going on or that my opinions are static... one of the most fundamental elements of my life is to continue to learn and grow... blogging facilitates that as well or better than anything i have ever done... besides, there's always the anonymous commenter to keep me humble...

What a bunch of BS this blog is !!
cchas | 04.28.07 - 2:02 pm | #

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