Suspicion mounts about 'burrowing' Bush appointees

[kpete]

Source: Raw Story

Suspicion mounts about 'burrowing' Bush appointees
Stephen C. Webster
Published: Tuesday February 10, 2009

Some liberals are beginning to suspect Bush loyalists in career government positions are doing their best to try to deflate and hinder President Obama's agenda.

When the New York Times published a story on a former Guantanamo detainee who allegedly joined Al Qaeda in Yemen after his release, the timing struck Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein as "suspicious." The paper published its report just one day after President Obama ordered the prison closed.

Stein wonders whether President Bush's political appointees at the Pentagon -- some of whom, the Associated Press reports, have become embedded in career jobs -- leaked information to the Times "as a way of sending a signal to the new president."

Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, asking him to "immediately review the circumstances behind the conversion of these positions and the hiring of any former Bush administration appointees as career or temporary officials within the Office of Detainee Affairs."

Read more: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Growing_suspicion_of_Bush_appointees_working_0210.html

[rudy23]

1. I remember when Goodling was asked if she took an oath to Bush

rather than the country, during one of those pointless hearings. She didn't answer.

[chollybocker]

7. Wasn't she also the one who said she loved to "service Bush"?

[SpiralHawk]

10. "She didn't answer." That's because they are not loyal to America or the American people

They are loyal only to thier freaking totalitarian "Republicon Homeland."

To which I say, love America, or go find somewhere else for your hate-filled, fact-free, economy-destroying, hypocrisy-rich, wide-stance, diaper-clad, FAIL-freak Homeland.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. dig out the worms

[tridim]

3. Charge them all with treason.

Cheney is doing the same thing, they're trying to sabatage the Obama administration. Well, all of them except Bush who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.

[pacalo]

6. CIA needs some close scrutiny after Cheney moved just yards away from Langley.

[loudsue]

29. That right there is the first the the new administration should investigate.

I say follow the evidence anywhere it leads, and stay on it until the mess is rooted out.

[KittyWampus]

24. Wonder if any of them are in the IRS. How easy is it to find flaws in tax returns...

[Zorra]

4. Heh. Bu*h made it so Obama can wiretap anyone he pleases. The fascists

that Bu*h appointed better watch their treasonous nasty little selves.

[JohnWxy]

5. excise the tumors. recommended! you should cross-post from GD & GDP.

[4lbs]

8. The only reason Bush would have to appoint these people near the end of his presidency

is to create trouble by obstructing and spreading misinformation to the press.

[EFerrari]

9. Rawstory gets it right again. K&R

[byeya]

11. Getting rid of burrowers

As one who spent his career in the law enforcement end of federal service, I can verify that it's tough to fire someone.
Firing, however, isn't the point: You can reassign the person to a meaningless job or you can terminate the person for a reason, real or imagined, and let the burrower spend a small fortune and years, fighting to get the job back. By the time he or she has won, it's too late for that person to do damage.
The LE head of an agency had this happen and in the six years it took the person to regain the job, it was indeed too late. There was a payoff - taxpayer of course - and stern words were said, but the perps didn't suffer and got away with ridding themselves of a competent administrator.
Firing is tough: Other means are just about as effective and are easy.

[CitizenPatriot]

14. I hear they're looking for people in the sanitation dept

maybe President Obama can transfer them to that dept, where their efforts at scrubbing up after human waste, i.e., the Bush admin, will be most effective for tax payers.

[Cha]

12. Just like ol times..the bushits and the corporatemediawhores

trying to tramp down Reality. Did we really think just because The People Elected Obama that the cmwhores and the repukes would stop with the shit they pulled the last 8 years?

My money's on my Prez.

[glitch]

15. No we really didn't. I vote we create a department of useless and ship them somewhere unpleasant

An island with lots of snakes and spiders and very few amenities. They can have an office with desks and everything, but the phones won't work. Neither will the Internet. And mail flights will be once a month.

Damn, what was that name of the department of idiot bureaucrats in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

[FiveGoodMen]

17. I propose three large space ships or arks, if you will, named A, B, and C...

[santamargarita]

13. Marginalize and fire these fascist pigs!

Goddamn Fucking Bush!

[rhett o rick]

16. I do not understand how they "burrowed" appointees. Can't appointees be

unappointed? At least we know who they are. How did they get top government jobs, where others fired to make room? Were jobs created for them?

[Platypus]

25. What "burrowing" means...

...is that they transferred from those appointed positions (where they could easily be un-appointed at the president's whim) to the career civil service (where any dismissal, demotion, or other disciplinary action can only occur for cause after a stringent review). That's what makes it so insidious and underhanded. These people aren't really career civil servants. They don't know what "service" means, and "civil" is an even more alien concept. They do know about patronage, though. Their goal is to bring maximum discredit to their organizations, to government, to the very idea of government, in the hope that doing so will facilitate the anti-government (i.e. anti-citizen) regime's return to power. Then they expect to be rewarded with better jobs, consulting/lobbying fees, or opportunities to participate in state-sponsored thievery.

What's the solution, then? You can't fire them, you can't demote them, but there's nothing to prevent lateral transfers. "Lateral" in this case means maintenance of pay grades and such, but it doesn't mean maintenance of access to information or ability to screw up things that really matter. Create a new department doing something conservatives like, "laterally" transfer all the moles into it, maybe even "promote" a few to head it, wait for their own incompetence and lack of morals create a scandal or two so that the conservatives in congress or the media won't dare defend them or the new department's supposed purpose, then cut the entire thing loose as a cost-cutting measure that isn't subject to HR review. At worst, you keep them from having any real influence. At best, you get to appear as a cost-cutter cleaning up government, while in the process discrediting some conservative project in exactly the same way they tried to discredit all of government.

Does that sound like a dirty trick? It isn't, really. It wouldn't work on honest civil servants, who would not create the scandalous conditions necessary for it to play out. Only the deceitful become vulnerable, and that's justice - rough justice, perhaps, but justice nonetheless. Those who try to defecate on the real civil service in this way deserve to choke on their own excrement.

[snot]

27. v. helpful, thanks.

[intheflow]

18. OK, so the guy they detained was just buying carpets for his store--

engaging in free market capitalism--when he was arrested and sent to Guantanamo. Then when he left Guantanamo he joined up with Al Qaeda? How does that undermine Obama? Seems to me that compliments and underscores Obama's efforts to close Guantanamo, because it proves the prison has only served to recruit people for Al Qaeda.

[glinda]

19. Ya think?

[tom_paine]

20. No suspicion. They are Bush Cabal loyal to Bush and against America.

Nothing to wonder about. The Bushies have been so up-front and openly contemptuous with their villainous practices, it fairly dazzles the eyes.

Of course, Gates is a Loyal Bushie and so we have the customary problem STILL, of Bushies investigating Bushies.

Which gets the same results as their spiritual forebears, the Nazis investigating other Nazis.

[bottomtheweaver]

21. lol, Feinstein writes to GATES.

She is shocked, shocked to find Bushlers in the Pentagon, so she writes a to GATES.

Oh God it hurts.

:rofl: :rofl:

:rofl: :rofl:

:rofl: :rofl:

:rofl: :rofl:

:rofl: :rofl:

[ThoughtCriminal]

22. A Special Office For Burrowed Bushies could be created

Throw some unheated, uninsulated quonset huts on an island somewhere in the Aleutians and put them to work filing TPS reports.

[malaise]

23. They need to be watched

Do they have Rushican blackberries or Iphones with direct links to fellow Pukes. Expose them and fire them.

[meuniermr]

26. Can't we transfer

all these people to the Northern Marinaras, Thule AFB, Diego Garcia and other similar places?

[libodem]

28. They are loyal 'Bushies'

they should be expunged from the rolls. They did the same to us. And now is the time. No one really minds if it takes place right up front. It's expected. We are foolish if we don't. Those Bob Jones University twits are all ideologues, do not know how to think for themselves, and will never transition to a new way of thinking. What they will be, if left there, are spies. They will run tattle on every little thing they don't 'get' about the new administration. They absolutely need to be transitioned out. Effing Stepford Troll Idiots.

[dkofos]

30. Not a problem. Bush left us with the ability to tap any communication

device, for any reason. (just call it national security).

Shouldn't be to hard to weed out these motherfuckers.