Slum lords and pimps.

The three elected Republican administrations of my politically conscious lifetime - Nixon, Reagan/Bush and Bush II stand out for their corruption. Nixon was impeached and forced to resign for masterminding the commission of crimes while spying on his political opponents, for obstruction of justice in trying to cover them up, and for lying about that. Reagan appointed scores of crooks to cabinet and administrative positions, who set about using their power to line the pockets of friends and party loyalists or to look the other way while others did so. The Reagan administration set a still unbroken record for the number of its officials indicted or officially investigated for criminal acts – 138. The Savings and Loan scandal alone cost taxpayers $150,000,000,000.

George W. Bush started a war on false pretenses, and then set about awarding billions in no bid contracts to his friends. Now it appears that many of the Iraq infrastructure projects built by U.S. firms are crumbling and stand mostly as monuments to billions of wasted U.S. tax dollars. Iraq’s infrastructure resembles a scene from the recent dystopian satiric film Idiocracy.

The recent resignation of the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a typical example of the rampant corruption in George W. Bush’s administration here at home. She violated federal rules by giving internal agency documents to industry lobbyists that in some cases were used in lawsuits against the agency challenging its conservation policies. She changed the reports of agency scientists to make their findings more favorable to private and corporate interests, and in one case, her own ranch.

The conduct of the Deputy Secretary of State, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development illustrates the administration's hypocrisy. He pushed for funding to promote abstinence at the expense of funding for condom use in AIDS prevention, but resigned last month after it was alleged that he frequented prostitutes. He also was in charge of enforcing a U.S. requirement that aid recipients swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

It is also worth mentioning that Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, and subsequently appointed as head of the World Bank by Bush II, insisted that the greatest problem facing the World Bank is corruption. He now will likely have to resign because of his own corruption at the bank: using his office to obtain a promotion and a hefty raise for his girlfriend.

Perhaps the best illustration of the pervasive corruption under Bush II is the fact that for the first time in history, four Inspectors General simultaneously are under investigation for corruption. These "watchdogs" are appointed by a President to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. This follows the resignation of three other Inspectors General appointed by Bush II after they were accused of abusing their offices.

Under Bush II, good government always takes a back seat to advancing the power of the G.O.P. Part of this strategy is a widespread effort to "purify" government agencies so that staff, even those in career civil service jobs, are party loyalists. This brings two analogies to mind. The first is the McCarthy era of the 1950's, when Senators McCarthy and Nixon went on a witch hunt for suspected Communists in government. (Watch Good Night, and Good Luck if you want to learn about it.) The second was the practice, during the Communist heydays in the Soviet Union and China, of appointing political officers in every government office and military unit, even in those with as few as a dozen people. The political officer often had more authority than the director or commander, and was responsible for ensuring that policies were in line with party doctrine and that persons suspected of being anything but absolutely loyal were fired or imprisoned. (See The Hunt for Red October for an example.)

As Frank Rich says in his May 13 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times, the focus on party loyalty is the result of Bush II giving his politic strategist Karl Rove free "reign" to remake government. According to Ron Suskind, White House staff have a name to describe their mission: "strategery." This was taken from a Saturday Night Live skit about George Bush in the 2000 election, and reflects the belief that public policy is a farce and politics is all that matters. In Suskind’s January 2003 article, he quotes John DiIulio, an academic who ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for Bush II. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything – and I mean everything – being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." DiIulio added that under Bush II, "policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver."

DiIulio's observation has been borne out in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort. In part to bolster the party’s unholy alliance with the religious right, many of the Americans hired by both government and private contractors to rebuild Iraq were hired primarily for being G.O.P. loyalists and staunch religious conservatives, and often were otherwise unqualified for their positions. Most knew nothing about Middle Eastern culture and had never traveled outside the U.S.

The most recent exposure of Bush/Rove strategery, and how it has been implemented by political officers, comes from the story of Monica Goodling, who took the fifth amendment rather than testify before Congress about her role in the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. (See my previous post.) A 1999 graduate of a law school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, she began as an opposition researcher (dirt finder) for the Republican National Committee in the 2000 presidential campaign. Meteorically, she rose to become deputy director of the executive office of the Justice Department, and then became liaison to the White House. She stands accused of using political criteria when interviewing applicants for civil service jobs and for the department's honors program for recent law school graduates. Posing as the anti-Clinton, she even asked some applicants if they had cheated on their spouses. At the age of 32, she received hiring and firing authority for all political appointments in Justice headquarters, including the heads of the various enforcement divisions. (Readers will be relieved to know that she is currently under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, a political appointee.)

Republican control of Congress over the past twelve years brought a level of corruption unprecedented in past seventy-five years. Ethics and their enforcement were put on hold by Gingrich, Army, DeLay and their cronies. You have to go back to the time of Warren G. Harding to find anything comparable.

Why this pattern? It’s really quite simple. When a basic tenant of your political philosophy is that government is evil and wasteful, it becomes easy to view government as nothing more than a means to power and an exploitable asset. (See Paul Krugman’s March 19 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times.) As Reagan defined it in his inaugural speech, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." The leaders of the Republican party have treated our government as a slum lord treats an apartment building, as a pimp treats a whore, or as a corporate raider treats an acquired subsidiary. The G.O.P. has no respect for government, except as a tool in the party’s crusades for permanent power and as a means to increase the personal wealth of its elites. This has been consistent across four decades of G.O.P. Presidencies.

Postscript: Those who argue that the Clinton administration was similarly corrupt have been getting their news from right wing talk radio. Republican Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who spent most of Clinton’s time as President investigating him, spent more than 50,000,000 tax dollars to prove nothing more damaging to the administration than that Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it. Clinton did let some big political donors spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom, which was not illegal. Republicans castigated him for this, but in the hypocrisy that comes so easily to them, recently rewarded their big donors with seats at the official state dinner for the Queen of England.

Update: The book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, describes how conservatives have set about destroying government from within for the reasons described above.

Prosecutor-gate: "Idiocy on the part of the administration"

That’s how Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, member of the Judiciary Committee, described the Bush White House and Justice Department’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys (see previous post). This affair is cratering around "The Architect" Karl Rove. For perhaps the first time in six years, a desire for the appearance of integrity is a stronger motivator for many Republican members of Congress than loyalty to the President. There have been some mavericks before on the war and civil liberties, but what I’m calling "Prosecutor-gate" is bringing out Republican critics in significant numbers.

Today’s news reveals how deep the elbows of the President and senior White House aides were into this putrid mess, despite their repeated earlier denials. But there is another intriguing detail. Apparently the internal rationale used to justify firing the U.S. Attorneys was that they were not pursuing voter fraud cases.

Allegations of cheating in the last two close Presidential elections break down along on party lines. Republicans claim that a significant numbers of voters actually are ineligible to vote because they are felons (in some states) or non-citizens, or because they vote more than once in an election. Although very little voter fraud has been documented, Republicans say that election officials and prosecutors just aren’t looking hard enough.

Democrats assert the bigger problem needing attention is institutional disenfranchisement of poor people more likely to vote Democratic. One tactic Republican elections officials have used is dropping voters from the rolls in heavily Democratic precincts using inaccurate lists of felons, who by law in some states lose their right to vote. Another is threatening to arrest people if they show up to vote and are improperly registered or have outstanding warrants. This scares off people who fear the police. A third method is not providing enough resources to handle demand at polling stations in poor precincts. In the past twenty years, there is far more documented evidence of institutional vote suppression (committed by both parties) that has affected far more elections than there is of fraud committed by voters. The intense scrutiny of the close elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 found many instances of vote suppression, with the Republican Party in charge in both states.

Republicans want more focus on voter fraud for three reasons. The first is because they believe that people desperate enough to take money to engage in voter fraud are usually felons, migrants and poor people more likely to vote for Democrats. The second reason, say Democrats, is that making voter fraud the villain draws attention away from the Republicans' use of institutional disenfranchisement. The third reason is that threats to prosecute voter fraud are themselves a form of vote suppression, and Republican election strategy relies on intimidating indigent and poorly educated voters to stay away from the polls.

What Republican leaders want are some voter fraud prosecutions, especially in states where Democrats are in power. This is where the fired U.S. Attorneys come in. (Never mind that the U.S. Attorneys are supposed to be protecting us from organized crime and terrorists and that local law enforcement is much better suited to going after individual fraudulent voters – if they exist.) Senator Pete Domenici and Congresswoman Heather Wilson, both Republicans from New Mexico – a state with a large number of poor immigrants – have admitted asking the now fired U.S. Attorney to begin a voter fraud prosecution before the last election. Wilson is the ranking Republican member of the House Ethics Committee and should have known better. (By the way, the fired U.S. Attorney in New Mexico was the Navy prosecutor portrayed by Tom Cruise in the film A Few Good Men.)

It’s no surprise that of the eight U.S. Attorneys fired in Prosecutor-gate, seven are from states in the South or West with significant migrant farm worker populations. Seven are from states with administrations controlled by Democrats, or in the case of California, from a state where the Governor is a Republican in name only and the Attorney General is Democrat Jerry Brown. In other words, the fired prosecutors came from states where Republicans have a strong interest in bringing voter fraud prosecutions for partisan political ends.

That's how badly Karl Rove and the Republican party leadership want to win elections.

(See N.Y.Times Editorial published March 16, arguing that "the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people," and that the eight U.S. Attorneys were fired for not using "their offices to help Republicans win elections.")

Rove's latest dirty trick: The Patriot Act prosecutor switch

Just when you may have thought there might be nothing more to know about the extraordinary malfeasance by the Bush administration, come more sickening details. A little-known provision of the "Patriot" Act apparently was designed for no other purpose than to allow Karl Rove to create more Republican pseudo prosecutors to run for Congress. The plan, as described in a N.Y. Times Op-ed, kills two birds with one stone. It lets Bush axe some particularly effective prosecutors of corrupt Republicans and replace them with inexperienced novices who will then use their new title of U.S. Attorney as a tough-on-crime credential to win a seat in the 2008 election. Diabolical. The change in the Patriot Act allows the newbies to serve indefinitely as interim U.S. Attorneys without ever having to face the embarrassment of rejection by the Senate.

As with so many of these political dirty tricks and abuses of power, Democrats will not have enough guile to use them if they get the White House back, so there is very little downside for the Republicans. Public outcry (and maybe some sense of the integrity that is critical to public trust in the inherent power of the U.S. Attorney post) probably will motivate Democrats to close this wormhole if they get the chance to overhaul the Patriot Act. But who knows? The bar has been set so low it may never get raised back to where it was before Bush came to town. (See followup story.)