Corruption, Cronyism and Incompetence

by digby

I sincerely hope that the Democrats in the House and Senate, no matter how much pressure they get to do otherwise from the “centrist” Mandarins and callow Kewl Kidz, go hard after the Bush administration on war profiteering, cronyism, corruption and waste. This is a rare opportunity for the Democrats to properly expose the Republicans for the crooks they are — and dispell the myth once and for all that they are the wise stewards of the taxpayers money.

With Rumsfeld’s ignominious and overdue downfall, and the new willingness, however tepid, among the press to look at the malfeasance in the pentagon, this may be the best opportunity they will have in decades to show just what a mistake it is to write blank chacks for military spending.

Jason Vest spells it out in this interesting new article about what Robert Gates is really facing at the Pentagon — and what he’s likely to do about it:

“Rumsfeld will have two legacies. One is the war—it’ll go down in history as much as Rumsfeld’s war as Bush’s war,” says Winslow Wheeler, a veteran former Senate staffer and investigator who now runs the Straus Military Reform Project at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Defense Information. “But initially, people will probably miss the other legacy, which is the total mismanagement of the Pentagon. He inherited gigantic problems—ones that had nothing to do with Iraq—and made them worse. Iraq is only one part of Gates’ job. He’s going to have to undo a disastrous legacy on budget, program, and management issues.”

Despite all the at-odds-with-reality praise once lavished on Rumsfeld for his supposedly brilliant management style (2002’s The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick probably won’t be meeting the test of time), nonpartisan studies and government audits have long shown Rumsfeld to be a less-than-able Pentagon steward. In 2002, for example, Bush’s own White House Office of Management and Budget initiated the President’s Management Scorecard, a sort of quarterly report card assessing the top management of 25 major federal agencies and departments.

It uses a “Stoplight Scoring System,” with green for success, yellow for mixed results, and red for unsatisfactory. Wheeler notes that the DOD’s columns are more often defined by red and yellow than green. “The last time I checked, DOD ranked 24 out of 25—hardly a ringing endorsement,” Wheeler says.

Another solid indicator of the true nature of Rumsfeld’s legacy can be found in the files of the Government Accountability Office, the congressional investigative arm. Of the hundreds of GAO investigative reports devoted to the Defense Department on Rumsfeld’s watch, 25 deal in some way with Iraq. The other 861 have titles that, in many cases, indicate that Iraq wasn’t the only crisis crying out for Rumsfeld’s attention. Some pull no punches (“DOD Wastes Billions of Dollars through Poorly Structured Incentives”); others are, intentionally or not, drolly understated (“Hurricane Katrina: Better Plans and Exercises Need to Guide the Military’s Response to Catastrophic Natural Disasters”). It’s also hard not to be struck by the frequency with which subtle-yet-pointed phrases like “actions needed,” “issues require attention,” and “room for improvement” appear. (“Oversight,” for example, often appears in contexts that indicate a marked lack of the practice.)

Though the GAO organizes its reports by subject matter and agency, it also pinpoints “High Risk” areas, which it defines as activities with “greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” In this area, Wheeler notes, “Rumsfeld’s DOD has earned itself more GAO High Risk reports on failed management than any other federal agency.”

Read the whole thing. The level of corruption and mismanagement is so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to believe that Republicans who built their careers screaming “tax and spend liberals!” have the nerve to even slink around the beltway like the lying weasels they are. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Being as he is a Bush crony himself, Gates has more than a few skeletons in his closet with their hands out, so I wouldn’t hold out any hope that he’s going to be a crusading good government reformer. Not to mention the fact that his history shows that he is more than willing to, shall we say, shade the truth. But he’s only in for two years anyway, so his only job will be to hold things together until Junior can be safely spirited back to Crawford and they can begin to re-write history without him around to muck it up. Nothing serious will get done until there is a new administration.

But these two years can serve a very important political purpose for the Democrats if they play their cards right. They have a once in a generation opportunity to shine the light on the Republican revolving door with the pentagon and defense contractors that makes the process so corrupt they don’t even bother to put the numbers in the budget anymore. The way to do this is to contrast this bloated cronyism with the lack of body armor for the troops, the treatment and benefits they receive when they get back, the unwillingness to properly spend money on homeland security and all the rest. Now is the moment to show that these people have been getting rich off the backs of Americans overseas and taxpayers at home.

This issue touches every aspect of the Republican cock-up of the last six years from the insistence on tax cuts for the rich in the face of wartime spending, to corruption, malfeasance and failure. It will illustrate better than any other issue the fact that Republicans in both the congress and the White House are incapable of seriously dealing with the threats we actually face and are willing to steal the treasury blind whenever they get their hands on the check book no matter what the circumstances. The polls showed that corruption was a salient issue for voters this time but they are only aware of the tip of the iceberg. Now is the time to tattoo this image on the foreheads of every Republican office holder in the country.

If they can use “acid, amnesty and abortion” against the Democrats for thirty years, the Democrats can use “corruption, cronyism and incompetence” against them. Every time they talk about Democrats “taxing and spending” the Democrats should counter with “taxing and stealing.” These people have shown over and over again that they will rob the citizens of this country blind and then blame it on black people or single mothers or the working man who didn’t happen to be born rich. The Dems have a chance to turn that back on them for a generation if they do this right.

There are huge problems awaiting the next president. Unbelievably huge problems. If this country elects another Republican he will be just as beholden to the same interests that spent five years getting filthy rich off the backs of dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan — and New Orleans. If over the next two years the Democrats can peel back the curtain on the deals that were made, the American people might just recognize that we cannot afford to allow any more of these con-artists and screw-ups to run the country.

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