So I was listening to the latest episode of “On The Media” on Mighty Ponygirl’s suggestion (because they have a great report on the Cult of Ayn Rand and how they’re trying to buy themselves credibility they can’t generate honestly), and I heard this story that I think should be an iconic example of how the Bush administration is both evil and stupid. It’s about the corruption in the Office of Special Counsel, which is a whistleblower protection agency. As you can imagine, the Bush administration is opposed to whistleblowing (and puppies and kittens and sunshine), so they went out and found the craziest asshole wingnut possible to head up this office: Scott Bloch. He did an admirable job of refusing to do the job he was appointed, and in proper BushCo fashion, this exemplar of malfeasance is now facing a cavalcade of subpoenas and general calls for his head. Bloch ran into trouble when he squelched a complaint that came from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, because it turns out they were able to get the FBI to care enough to raid Bloch’s offices, take his computers, and subpoena 17 employees to testify against him. The executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suggesting that Bloch successfully destroyed the office to the point where it’s easier now to dismantle it and rebuild how the government handles whistleblowers than to salvage the office.
So a job well done by the government that exists to destroy everything good about government, right? Not much different than the daily stories of corruption and moral turpitude coming from the Bush administration? Well, this story is extra special. Apparently, Bloch was so good at being a crazed wingnut that he even locked horns with the administration. From the transcript:
JEFF RUCH: He is supposed to be the guardian of the merit system, the merit system being the principles that govern federal service. And it’s a very important office that Congress invested with a certain amount of independence in that the person cannot be removed by the whim of the president. He may only be removed by the president for cause.
Mr. Bloch has told people that the White House has twice previously asked him to resign, and he’s refused.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Really? Why do you think it asked him to resign?
JEFF RUCH: Scott Bloch has been accusing the White House of being part of a gay rights conspiracy to persecute him. He took a position that the laws against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation couldn’t be enforced, and it was a position that, from what we could tell, didn’t match with the law and was reversed on the order of the White House.
And the Bush Administration’s not really known to be a proponent of what some would call the gay rights agenda, and so it took a fairly extreme position for their intervention. That appeared to start a cascade of bad blood that may have culminated in recent events.
At this point, I nearly fell over from laughing so hard. The danger in promoting the careers of paranoid wingnuts is that it’s only a matter of time before they start seeing you as part of the Librul Conspiracy. Bloch thought he was there to torment men who blow each others’ whistles I guess. He must have been sorely disappointed to find out it was mostly paperwork pushing.
13 Responses to “Too wingnutty for the Bush administration”
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This is really a microcosm of the relationship between the money-and-power republicans like Cheney, Bush and McCain and the christianist right wing.
Two take-aways:
First, choose your sycophantic shills better so they don’t try to bite you in the ass. Abu Gonzales, and Michael “GQ Cover” Brown are a couple of shinning examples.
Second, make sure the FBI is operated just as evilly as the rest of the DOJ, and only gets used to persecute Cheney/Bush “enemies”, not any real crimes. By Cheney/Bush rules nothing they do is capable of being wrong, so why even look there? Duh!
If they’re serious about completely ruining the Federal Government, they need to kick it up a few more notches.
Maybe that’s why they want McCain / Bush’s Third Term so badly…
I think he should be sentenced to death by drowning in a bathtub.
Maybe that would save him future torment from the eevile gay voices in his head and the little purple communist illegal space alien body thetans that hassle his soul?
In a tiny way, this is a repeat of the experience the Republicans had with Joe McCarthy. They rode his wild accusations and slanders to control of the White House and Congress, only to see him turn around and start attacking them.
“They rode his wild accusations and slanders to control of the White House and Congress, only to see him turn around and start attacking them.”
…which is always the problem with “True Believers”. Sooner or later you are not considered faithful enough and get whacked anyway. Kinda like this…
That’s what’s especially interesting about a guy like Karl Rove. I’m not sure he actually believes a single thing he says. He is all about the competition, and in the end winning is all that counts. He’s not seeking to perfect America or any other political goal. Success counts, what you do with it is immaterial to people like him - as long as you keep winning…
I’m not sure [Karl Rove] actually believes a single thing he says. He is all about the competition, and in the end winning is all that counts.
Actually, Mike, Joe McCarthy was very much like that too. The difference between him and Rove is that Rove is competing for George Bush and his GOP allies, whereas McCarthy was interested in no one and nothing but himself.
We need to be careful — the Republican party is going to learn from this: They wasted all of their “good” wingnuts early in the administration, and now that we’re to inured and bored to care about their gross incompetance and corruption, they’re stuck with the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrell wingnuts, when their first stringers could have done some REAL damage if they were installed during a period of complete dipshit burnout apathy.
we’re too inured, rather
Quoth the great Trailerpark Supervisor Jim Lahey of Sunnyvale Trailer Park fame: “The Shitapple driving the shitmobile, Randy.”
Well, I’m sure Regent U. Law is hireing…
The optics of this story, as interpereted by liberal blogs, are fascinating. The first version I read was about how the heroic FBI had the guts to take on a Bush crony. The second version was about how the corrupt FBI was persecuting the head of the independent office in charge of protecting whistleblowers. Now we find that the FBI was aparently justified in going after the guy because he was in fact a partisan wingnut.
Excuse me while I wait for my head to stop spinning.
“The optics of this story, as interpereted by liberal blogs, are fascinating.”
Yeah, fascinating. Because with this completely transparent and open administration where secrecy is a bad word…Wait!
This administration would classify presidential press conferences if they could.
So in a low-information situation, people struggled to makes sense of something that was happening. And in your estimation this was bad to do. And so your head spins.
I wonder: We’re you one of the marching hordes of sycophantic wingnut idiots who eagerly switched from believing one justification for invading Iraq to the next without ever noting they were in direct contradiction of each other and all were unsupported by any factual information?
Here’s a little advice - People who worship glass presidencies shouldn’t throw stones…
So in a low-information situation, people struggled to makes sense of something that was happening. And in your estimation this was bad to do. And so your head spins.
No, my head spins because I am ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE struggling to make sense.
And I was against the invasion of Iraq from the start.