This makes my stomach turn
Bush picked loyalty over talent when selecting workers to reconstruct Iraq. Here's how it worked:
And here are the results:
O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .
A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.I listened to some of Bush's press conference on Friday during the drive into work; he claimed that his latest attempt to circumvent the Constitution and Geneva Conventions is designed primarily to clarify the law. He basically repeated himself thirty times and got mad when asked the same question repeatedly. Then I read the Bill Clinton profile in this week's New Yorker and had one of those burning yearnings for another President, another country, another mindset that periodically plagues all well-intentioned people on the left.
Ugh.
posted by Matt Stewart @ 4:24 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Arrogance and stupidity, a lethal combination. That guy has it in spades.
I can't even listen to him speak anymore without wanting to put my foot through the television. My foot is glad when I merely change the channel.
Dude, did you notice that the 24 year-old with no finance background in charge of re-opening the stock exchange was our old college classmate? I remember Jay was a good guy, but this is totally insane.
Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.
He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?
"Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office.
Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?
The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.
Post a Comment
<< Home