Bush Governance

There is one overriding theme to the Bush Administration’s approach to governance. They do not see themselves as elected officials responsible for governing the United States, which implies respecting and honoring its institutions and all of its people. Instead they have read their election as the means for rewarding their partisan followers, their base, and their large business supporters. They surround themselves with small coteries of inexperienced staff whose main attributes are loyalty to Bush and whose knowledge is limited to Republican political campaigns and issues.

Nothing better exemplifies this then the selection of people to administer and manage entities that they control. The Coalition Provisional Authority established to run Iraq immediately after the invasion was filled with loyal Bush supporters drawn from Republican Congressional staffs and lobbyist groups. These inexperienced people had no qualifications (Arabic language skills, knowledge of Middle East culture, or experience in building an infrastructure in a developing country). People with such expertise were rejected, if even thought about, because they had no credentials in Republican politics or social issues.

Paul Wolfowitz brought in a small group of like-minded deputies and assistants who ignored long-employed World Bank staff and proceeded to alienate the people who had to carry out bank policies. This was just a continuation of what he had done at the Pentagon where the administration ignored intelligence from the spy agencies, created its own intelligence group, with the support of Cheney’s staff, and twisted information to meet its already established goal of invading Iraq.

Alberto Gonzales used the same approach, having his immediate staff assistants review prospective US attorneys to insure they had conservative credentials while disregarding experience and education. The independence of the Justice system was subverted in order to fill Justice Department legal positions with Bushies.

Regulatory agency political appointees have continually ignored scientifically based consensus recommendations in order to meet the agenda of the Republican fundamentalist base and large business interests. Environmental, drug, and health issues are ignored. Global warming is written off as not a threat to the world; drugs are approved without sufficient testing relying on drug companies themselves to determine drug safety; the FDA food testing ability is being reduced by 50% at the same time as contaminated food imported from China increases in danger.

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

The following is from The Onion Weekly Dispatch May 23, 2007. Although not a part of the article, anecdotal evidence is that upwards of 99% of the 38% voted for Bush in 2004.

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

"On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them."

In 2002, Fultz's team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.