Government as political machine
by digby
Didn’t we just go through something like this with the Bush administration?
I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal employees delivering the right services in a highly efficient way and then wants to get rid of those folks who are in fact wasteful, or those folks who are ideologically so far to the left, or those people who want to frankly dictate to the rest of us,” Gingrich said in response to a question from a federal employee at the forum.
I don’t think people ever properly understood what was going on with the Bush administration’s manipulation of the government itself for partisan gain. For example, they turned normal non-partisan jobs into political appointments, purged departments of those who they deemed to be suspiciously liberal and unleashed the Department of Justice to intervene in elections on behalf of the GOP.That’s not even counting the systematic takeover of the judiciary.
This is a hallmark of conservative movement goals, which seeks to transform the government itself into a partisan apparatus. It most closely resembles machine politics, with a full blown patronage operations devoted to installing like-minded and financially dependent operatives into the permanent machinery of the government.
We knew this, of course, after watching the Bushies over eight long years.But the Democratic administration came in believing they had vanquished this unseemly form of partisan warfare by the sheer will of Will.I.Am so there was no need to look in the rearview mirror to try to right what was wrong. No lessons have been learned as a result — and presidential candidates feel perfectly free to campaign on the idea that they have a right to fire government employees who they don’t see as being ideologically congenial. Considering that they think science and facts have a liberal bias these days, I think we can see the writing on the wall.
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