WP: Fox-in-the-Henhouse Government

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/03/AR2007040301576.html?referrer=email

Fox-in-the-Henhouse Government

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, April 4, 2007; Page A13

The Bush administration's House of Straw seems to be blowing apart, buffeted by alternating gusts of scandal and incompetence.

The tornado of disastrous headlines -- a Pentagon that can't take proper care of its wounded, a Justice Department that can't be trusted to follow the law or tell the truth to Congress, a top White House aide who lied to a grand jury-- has been so overpowering that the day-to-day outrages of life in the Bush administration tend get overlooked.

So it's worth pausing to pay attention to some recent events that similarly underscore the failings of this administration and illuminate one of their root causes: a contemptuous attitude toward government itself. These episodes illustrate the administration's fox-guarding-the-henhouse personnel plan, the disdain of its appointees for the laws they are sworn to enforce and their spoils-of-war attitude toward the government they are entrusted with overseeing:

· The president's amazing-even-for-this-crowd choice to oversee the federal family planning program, Eric Keroack, resigned after Medicaid officials in Massachusetts, where he had a private medical practice, questioned his billings. Keroack's suitability for the family planning post, in which he was responsible for overseeing the distribution of contraceptives to low-income women? He was director of a group that finds contraception "demeaning to women" and won't distribute it -- even to married women.

· President Bush nominated Michael Baroody, a top official at the National Association of Manufacturers, to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission -- the agency charged with protecting consumers against the dangerous products of, yes, manufacturers.

Perhaps Baroody would be a great chairman, but he's spent most of the past two decades looking out for the interests of manufacturers, not consumers. The manufacturers association recently pressed the CPSC to relax its rules about when manufacturers must report incidents of defective products. (It did.) The group argued, again successfully, against a petition to require makers of cribs, strollers and similar items to include registration cards with their products to be able to help notify consumers in a recall.

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[never cry wolf]

1. K & R.... not that we here didn't know this crap is going on.