There is, by now, a small avalanche of books by journalists and former Bush Administration insiders that chronicle how, over the past eight years, a democratic government was replaced by cadres of ideological servants who put service to George W. Bush and the Republican Party ahead of their duties to the country itself. Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is only the latest to weigh in on this.
In this growing library, the book I think should be required reading for decades to come is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City. The setting is Baghdad, not Washington, D.C., but Chandrasekaran’s reporting (he works for the Washington Post) is riveting because of how he documents the purging of competent and devoted public servants and their replacement with inexperienced and mostly young, conservative ideologues in the grand effort to rebuild post-war Iraq. I say riveting, but it’s also nauseating and funny. As comedian Jon Stewart recently observed, it’s hard to do original political satire once you learn, to cite one of Chandrasekaran’s findings, that questions about Roe v. Wade and whether the applicant voted for George W. Bush were part of the hiring process for the Coalition Provisional Authority that administered the post-war reconstruction.
I grew up and started my work as a student journalist in a U.S. Government company town in the Panama Canal Zone. It was unthinkable even under President Nixon that the government would choose generals, or engineers, or demolition experts like my grandfather based on who they voted for, or how they felt about legalized abortion. It wasn’t just that politics was supposed to stop at the water’s edge of the USA proper, it was the inculcated expectation that regardless of which party held power, government service was supposed to be based on professional competence and merit. Period.
There’s a direct line between Chandrasekaran’s Emerald City and the Alberto Gonzales/Monica Goodling debacle in which hiring decisions that Goodling oversaw in the Bush Justice Department were based on the same ideological litmus tests as Chandrasekaran described from Iraq. The main criteria was ideological purity and loyalty to a person, George W. Bush.
There’s irony here. The American Revolutionary War was actually fought over the argument about whether citizens had inalienable rights to self-governance, or owed primary allegiance to King George III. I was taught that we’d won that argument in 1776 and 1812.
There’s also a deafening silence. From Republicans. That’s why you should know who Bruce Fein is because Fein, a Republican, is a very rare exception. He also knows something about the law having served with some prominence in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. You may not have heard of Fein because although he has been outspoken in condemning the current President’s “flagrant contempt for the Constitution,” his advocacy for holding Bush accountable is not welcome in the center tents of American media and politics. The words “deafening silence” are his.
I was thinking of Fein recently because the Republican convention is coming up on September 1st, and I was daydreaming about the possibility someone in the podium committee would mess up and give him the floor in prime time. If so, he might say something like this:
“I have been more disappointed than surprised over the deafening silence of conservatives over Bush’s scorn for the rule of law,” Fein wrote to Andrew Bard Schmookler in a 2006 letter interview. “I believe the learned conservatives generally remain silent because their law and lobby practices require them to maintain access to the Bush administration, and access is power in Washington, D.C. Most people will sell their souls for a mess of pottage.”
Again, that’s my daydream. In real life it will be Mitt Romney, or Libby Dole. If the issue of Bush’s war against the Constitution and the rule of law comes up at all, I’d wager it will come up only as a way to challenge the loyalty and patriotism of the President’s critics.
Tim Connor
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