...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Monday, July 07, 2003
      ( 10:37 AM )
 
The CEO President

Remember back before the 2000 election? I know, it's hard to get beyond the fog of what's happened since, but work with me. Candidate Bush and his press people touted the fact that he would be our first "CEO President," able to efficiently run the government like a business and get rid of all the waste and fat. He made sure we all knew he was an OUTSIDER and that he would bring freshness to the entire scene inside the Beltway (having lived inside the Beltway, I didn't believe that was possible anyway).

But, as with most of his campaign promises, this one has fallen the way of colored leaves in autumn. If he truly were an effective CEO, why have there not been any firings or responsibility taken for 9/11? In the wake of an event like that, someone should have been canned -- at least to show that the old ways of doing things were going to end. And Paul Wolfowitz, speaking up at any turn - saying things like "we just used the weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to go in to Iraq" - shouldn't he have been fired long ago? What about the conversations revealed in Bob Woodward's book following 9/11, showing Bush totally out of his depth in trying to figure out what to do, and revealing that Rumsfeld and Cheney already made a push to blame and invade Iraq even the day after 9/11. And instead of streamlining government and making things run more efficiently, he's created a mammoth new agency for "homeland security," signed in several unfunded mandates for states, including his dead-in-the-water "leave no child behind" education bill, and he's cut taxes twice when revenue continues to fall and the deficit rise. He was quick to usurp the power of the United Nations to get his (Cheney and Rumsfeld's) way with Iraq, and to declare it "irrelevant." In the wake of seriously damaging relationships with our allies (or business partners, in CEO-speak), he now wants the UN to step in and take over peacekeeping in a country the UN didn't want to invade in the first place. So now they aren't as irrelevant, I guess, and he intends to sweet talk the rest of the world back to doing what we say after we tromped them all so unceremoniously last winter? Is this the way a good CEO would operate his company??

There is something going on in this administration that is not right. George W. Bush seems to be admired by his supporters because of his strength of leadership. Is that what we've come to? Admiring someone because they seem decisive, even though their rash decisions lead to the ongoing deaths of our troops and the doomed policy of "pre-emptive war?" He may be good at delegating; Rumsfeld and Cheney seem to have things well in hand for their long-held plans in the middle east. But he is terrible with employee relations - a constant stream of diplomats and advisors have left the administration.

It's been scary to watch the way our country has deteriorated in all aspects: economically, socially, in our foreign relations, culturally, and even our long-protected civil rights. It's been scary to see how easily we were led into this debacle in Iraq by false information, innuendo and scare-tactics. It's sad to think of how long it will take to get out of it now. Meanwhile, this week our CEO President is travelling in Africa, flaunting a plan to help take care of the AIDS epidemic, but keeping quiet the provisos that we don't want African nations to use more affordable generic drugs, our money primarily goes to clinics that don't offer abortions, we intend to bully African nations into buying genetically altered crops from us and blocking trade on their crops if they don't, and after Congress gets through with the AIDS aid package, it will be a shadow of its promised former-self. But I suppose this is just par for the course for a guy who couldn't even manage a baseball team and who kept as a close friend a man who robbed his faithful employees blind and has yet to be charged with a crime.

It's time for a change in Washington.

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