Lying is no sin for this collection of Bush minions

[struggle4progress]

<snip> In the Bush administration, you lose your job not for lying but for telling the truth, as the axing of Gen. Eric Shinseki and economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey shows. No wonder most government officials wait until they're former officials before speaking out, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke did.

Those who speak in real time are soon gone. Consider the case of the Department of Homeland Security's former inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin. When Ervin, a Republican and a Harvard Law School graduate, reported that only 6 percent of oceangoing cargo was being inspected, that known felons were operating airport checkpoints, that no consolidated terrorist watch list had been compiled and that the managers responsible for these failures had been feted at a lavish awards ceremony that cost half a million dollars, the White House allowed his appointment to lapse, costing him his job, according to Susan Collins, R-Maine, the Senate Government Affairs Committee chairwoman.

The opposite happened over at the inspector general's office at the Department of Health and Human Services. The IG there decided it was perfectly fine for former Medicare chief Thomas Scully to repeatedly threaten to fire a subordinate if he dared tell Congress (which had asked) that the prescription drug bill would cost nearly $200 billion more than the president was letting on. The subordinate's silence carried the day. It wasn't until after the bill passed with the vote of 13 Republican deficit hawks (who had sworn they couldn't vote for a bill costing more than $400 billion) that President Bush said, oops, the price was $534 billion after all. <snip>

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales has put off telling the truth, perhaps forever. He went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and pretended he didn't mean the things he wrote in his memo calling the Geneva Convention "quaint" and "obsolete," and that, in any event, he just hates torture. However, when asked whether torture could be used by U.S. personnel under any circumstances, he said he didn't think so, but "I'd want to get back to you on that." <snip>

http://www.decaturdailydemocrat.com/articles/2005/01/17/news/opinion/editorial03.txt

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Yet Christian Republicans keep voting for them.

Go figure.

[indepat]

2. Giving us the government we so richly deserve, especially those of the

Gonzales ilk.