What time is it? Subpoena Time!!!

Subpoenas!

Subpoenas!

Subpoenas!

Whoo-hoo!!!

Missing Email Scandal

This is another vague, amorphous "scandal"... ish. But it has shocking ties right into the caging list scandal.

White House staff (and who knows who else) used the Republican National Committee email server to communicate about political machinations.

This is against the Hatch Act, which governs the political vs. public aspects of the White House. The more familiar aspect of the Act is to say that politicians aren't supposed to use their office, their official vehicle, or any other resources of the White House to do political business. For example, if Karl Rove wanted to find out the polling numbers for the GOP in Iowa, he couldn't use his WH email account for that. This keeps those in the administration from wasting government resources on their own re-elections.

But the other side of the Act also dictates that official business can't be done outside the office. While the flip side is about preserving resources, this side is about preserving all documentation about an Administration. Rove can't use his RNC account to discuss amendments to a bill, for example. Doing so would not only violate the Hatch Act, but also allow him to hide presidential records from the National Archives.

Hiding records by using an outside email account goes against the Presidential Records Act, which regulates how all the "paperwork" (in quotes because now it's virtual too, of course) generated by the Administration will be handled. Under the PRA, everything has to be saved until the National Archives says it's OK to throw it out (usually done during the sorting process for the Presidential Library, I suspect).

Which brings us to the next part of this story. When the Congressional committees who were holding hearings on various political machinations of the Administration, they found that when they subpoenaed all the records and emails, many, many were missing. Inquiries revealed that the WH officials and staff had been using the RNC server for both political and policy matters.

Yes, it is true that times have changed. Yes, it's true that not so long ago, no one had ever heard of email. Yes, it's true that those of us with multiple email accounts get confused too. However, emails that have been recovered show this was intentional:

Susan Ralston, who was Karl Rove’s executive assistant, invited two lobbyists working for Jack Abramoff to use her RNC e-mail account to avoid “security issues” with the White House e-mail system, writing: “I now have an RNC blackbeny which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.” [ThinkProgress]

However, when Congress attempted to subpoena the emails from the RNC, they had been deleted. Four years worth of emails, approximately 5 million, were missing from the RNC servers. This is yet another assault on the PRA; had the emails been carefully preserved, the WH might have only gotten in trouble over the Hatch Act ("What were the emails doing on the RNC server in the first place?") but in this case, they have effectively destroyed administration records.

Or, are all the emails missing? At least 500 of these emails were victims of yet another mistake, this one for real: the sender typed in "rnc.com" instead of "rnc.org". (In fact much of what we know comes from similar mistakes in addressing.) Fortunately for history, "rnc.com" was a parody site that was owned by a friend of BBC reporter David Palast. As Palast describes in his book, Armed Madhouse, some of the incriminating emails Congress was looking for were in these 500, including the smoking gun of caging lists. Senator John Conyers is now investigating these emails.

UPDATE: While we can't get the MSM to pick up on this story, at least CNN today is finally mentioning that some emails are missing (altho it's buried in their politics page)...

King George

The other day (the 17th) at a press conference, when referring to the US Attorneys, said:

"...[The US Attorneys] serve at our pleasure."

"Our" is the ROYAL plural, a pronoun only a king or queen can use. It's even more chilling when using it to talk about "serving at the pleasure of..."

No one else caught this, of course, just your trusty Shakespeare-studying politico gal, LMP.

Perhaps there was another answer. Perhaps he was frankly admitting that he's handled by a team that doesn't let him make decisions. He couldn't be referring to the White House or the Administration as a group, because the US Attorneys don't serve at the pleasure of the VP, or the AG, or any team made up of any of these people. They do in fact serve at the pleasure, or discretion, of the President and only the President. He could only be referring to the group that is making his decisions for him. The "Decider", huh!

I'm awfully scared that the reason the GOP seems so unprepared for the 2008 election is that there isn't going to be one, and we just end up with King George until the end of his days.

The State of The Union Address

Hi there to all of you in Blogland! Sorry that is has been so long since I posted. I have a sewing machine now, you know how it is.

Today I want to address a few lines from the State of the Union. If you read other pol blogs, then you've probably seen many takes on this speech. Personally, I couldn't listen to his grating condescension, so I waited until it posted on the net, here, and read it today.

In reading the SOU, a few lines jumped out at me. Perhaps they aren't the big issues (most of the big issues were treated with more rhetoric that may or may not ever pan out), but here they are, in the order of where they came in the speech.

In the coming weeks, I will submit a budget that eliminates the federal deficit within the next five years.

Really? Because, you know, you and your cronies took a surplus and created a devastating deficit. And after SIX years of this chaos, you say you can fix it all in one budget and five years? With what, your magic wand? And why haven't you whipped that sucker out before and spun some budgetary magic? Oh, wait, you have. Just one line before, the Pres claimed that he had already put forth a plan to cut the deficit in half by 2009, and "[we] met that goal three years ahead of schedule." but many sources say that is smoke and mirrors-- it's based off of highly inflated numbers, and doesn't include the cost of our wars. The Washington Post said in 2004, "...in an independent analysis of that budget, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded it would not fulfill that promise. The deficit in fiscal 2004, which ended Sept. 30, was $413 billion. Under Bush's plan for spending and taxes, the deficit would be $258 billion in 2009. If anything, that may understate the size of the deficit in coming years because it does not include any additional costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." I've heard even better explanations of why this whole thing is a sham, but that's the one I found today.

Next, there is the matter of earmarks. These special interest items are often slipped into bills at the last hour -- when not even C-SPAN is watching. (Laughter.) In 2005 alone, the number of earmarks grew to over 13,000 and totaled nearly $18 billion. Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate -- they are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn't vote them into law. I didn't sign them into law. Yet, they're treated as if they have the force of law.

Oh, he's such a funny guy. And that "laughter" comment is embedded by the White House transcribers, not me. Oh, White House...

But, to the point. Read that over again, I'll wait. Now, doesn't that sound like something really bad has been happening in Congress? And the poor President, his hands are just as tied as our poor voter hands are. But wait-- he is, after all, the head of the GOP. And the GOP had an unprecedented stranglehold on Congress in this 2005 of which he speaks. The 13,000 , or worse, $18 billion in earmarks? Proposed by K Street Project Republican-only lobbyists, and generated by his GOP Congress. So I'm sorry, who is the victim here? It's like the date rapist claiming someone put something in his drink.

And what is he talking about when he says 90% of them "dropped into committee reports...[and] are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk"? (Actually, I really don't get that one, if someone wants to enlighten me, there's that comment section just begging for your posts!) Either they are in the bill or they're not. Or perhaps it's like making a budget for office supplies and putting $50 of paper clips on the list, but then only submitting the total to your boss? I don't know, it sounds very fishy. I know that the earmarkers do try to hide things, but... Well, I still don't get what he was trying to say.

I will say this about earmarks: not all of them are bad by definition. Maybe there are people that really do need a bridge built to them. But what I really don't like and would like to see changed is that any old earmark can go on any old bill. Let's at least stick to one topic! Don't stick a Girl Scout Museum earmark on a transportation bill. Don't stick a bridge-- to Nowhere or Somewhere-- on a farm bill. At least if we had this in place, we would get a better sense of where we spend our money. We would look at the bill, now with earmarks, and say, "OK, this totals $X for transportation," or "$Y for farm subsidies", or "$Z for cultural grants, we can/can't afford that," as opposed to hiding one transportation earmark in the farm bill and one cultural earmark in the transportation bill and never really getting a sense of what we're spending.

If you grocery shop at one of those Super Targets or Wal-Mart Supercenters, you know the havoc this can wreak on your budget. "$1000 for groceries this week! Zut alors! But almost nothing on car repair, that's great." "Oh, honey, I also got car seat covers, an oil change, and new tires at Wal-Mart." "Well, crap, now I have to rethink this whole thing, give me all your receipts..."

All I'm asking is that the earmarks go on the right bill. And then we can say, "We can't pay this much for transportation, let's look at the earmarks and see what can be cut this time, maybe we can build that bridge next time." There is probably a better argument for getting rid of earmarks, but for now this would be a start.

To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred, and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come and kill us.

Now, obviously, we're back to the war on terror. I think that there must be some secret agreement between WH speechwriters and Best Buy, because I swear they want me to throw something heavy at the TV!!! Why, you ask? Isn't what the POTUS is saying a reasonable response? Well, yes, and that is why I am so angry! Because here is what Karl Rove said just last year: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said.

[And then there were more brilliant observations which were eaten by Blogger. I'll try to get this finished asap-- tune back in!]

Morning Update

Tony Snow's Morning Update:

"President Bush Is 'Looking Forward to Working With the Democrats.'"

heh heh heh

Stranger than Fiction

Did you see that thing about Bush reading Camus' The Stranger on his vacation? Can you believe he admitted that? How dumb are his handlers?

For those of you not familiar, Camus' existentialist masterwork is about, as Jon Stewart so eloquently put it the other night, "a Westerner who kills an Arab on a beach for no reason and dies with no remorse." I love this book. It's an intense look at the inside of an existentialist's mind-- not just asking, "What is the point for all of us?" but more specifically, "If you've ever wondered how some people can just kill and not care, here's a peek at that kind of mind." Or at least, that's how I felt reading it. His description of shooting the stranger because the sun is glaring in his eyes is chilling. And for the perfect soundtrack, the Cure's first single, "Killing an Arab", is based on the book.

Apparently, especially for the Cure, there was some backlash because it was an Arab man that dies, but to me the significance was that he was a stranger, an immigrant, and instead of welcoming or being kind to someone far from home, Meursault kills him. It's the opposite of the Good Samaritan story. The vast cross-cultural aspect, a European and an Arab, makes for a more stark contrast (as opposed to a Frenchman and a Spaniard, for example). But I digress.

Why would they think that telling the world that he read The Stranger improves Bush's image? Was Karl Rove hit on the head? Or was it meant to make him look like some crazy maverick? Maybe they don't want the Bad Guys to see him as a lame duck so they are making him into Kim Jong Il, "He's craaaazy, so watch out! He kills Arabs and then for fun, he reads books about killing Arabs! He's one bad mother--" "watch your mouth!" "just talkin' 'bout W..."

When will these insane people give us back our country?

A Short Play: George Spills the Milk

A short play: George Spills the Milk.

George, age 6, and John, age 12, are in the kitchen. Colin, age 8, is there too, and Hillary, age 10, is in the living room. Mom is outside gardening.

George: I want some milk. Let me into the fridge.

John: OK, I mean, if you really need it, go ahead. Wait, [calls out] Hillary, what do you think?

Hillary [from the other room]: 'S fine...

George opens the fridge and lifts the glass bottle of milk, which starts to teeter in his hands.

John: George, don't spill it! I don't think this is a good idea anymore. Put it back.

Colin: If you spill it, you're going to have to clean it up.

George: I'm not going to spill it!

He manages to wrestle it out of the door shelf.

George: Mission Accomplished!

John: Watch it!

And George drops the milk. The glass shatters and the milk goes everywhere.

John: I knew it! You made a huge mess!

George: You told me I could get the milk. [as Colin opens his mouth] Shut up, Colin.

Colin: I'm not saying we're not friends anymore, but I'm going home.

Colin leaves.

John: I can't believe this mess!

George: I'm cleaning it, hold on.

He gets just one paper towel and starts to dab at the floor.

John: You're going to need more paper towels than that.

George: This one is just fine.

John: It's falling apart! It's not strong enough and rubbing it on the floor is tearing it up.

George: It will be fine...

He half-heartedly dabs at the floor, not really cleaning anything.

John: You needed more paper towels.

George: I know! I know! Ok, fine...

George gets more towels and continues mopping up the floor, not really getting anything clean. Hillary enters.

Hillary: What a mess!

George: I know, I know!

John: He needed more paper towels.

Hillary: Obviously. And steadier hands.

George: You said I could get the milk! You said!

Hillary: I didn't know you were going to make a huge mess, I thought you could handle it.

John: I didn't know you would spill it either. Besides, I told you you could before I told you not to. So just remember I said not to when you talk to Mom.

Mom enters.

Mom: Talk to Mom about what? Oh, my goodness! What a mess! Who is responsible for this?

George, Hillary, and John are all talking over each other.

George: You know how you said milk was important--

John: I told him not to--

Hillary: I was in the other room--

George: --they said I could!

John: I did not!

George: Did too! You said I could!

John: I said you could before I said you couldn't!!!

Mom: Enough! I need to go back out to the garden. The question is, who is going to be in charge now? It clearly shouldn't be George.

John: Me! I told him not to get out the milk AND I told him he needed more paper towels.

Hillary: Me! I mean, it's not really anyone's fault that the milk spilled, and I don't know exactly what to do about it, but George is a pooty-head.

John: Well, duh. We all know he's a pooty-head. The important thing is that I told him not to do it and I told him he needed more paper towels.

Mom: Yes, but what about the mess?

George: I cleaned it long enough. Now it's up to the next guy.

John: Well, it's a pretty big mess. I think paper towels are needed, more than George was ever going to use...

Hillary: Well, it is a big mess, and I mean, you never can tell where the milk is going to get to. I can't exactly say what I would do, I just know it needs to get cleaned up.

John: Obviously.

And here I bring down the curtain on my little play.

The point is, I'm getting really tired of this discussion. Yes, George is a pooty-head who spilled milk everywhere. Yes, it's going to be a mess cleaning it up, and no matter how much you are in opposition to him and his mess-making, whoever gets in there next is going to have to clean it up. And they will probably clean it up in basically the same way that George would, because there's not that many ways to do it.

So just because you are in opposition to George doesn't mean that "what you're going to do in Iraq" is going to be that much different than George would do if he stayed, or what any of your opponents would do: deal with the facts on the ground and try to get us out of there in one piece without leaving behind a hotbed of terrorism (the kind we left in Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out).

The salient point to sway me then, to choose the next POTUS, is that from now on you are going to be careful. That you won't get us recklessly into another war. That you will be honest with us. That you will start to deal with international terror cells in a law-enforcement paradigm and stop bashing around the world with your bombs. That you will start treating them like the cockroachy criminals that they are and stop elevating their status to warriors that we have to send our warriors to fight in a big-scale war. That the next time a POTUS tells me that we have to go to war to defend ourselves, we actually do. That we will go back to the Powell Doctrine. That we won't have this big mess again.

As for the cleaning up, well, it's going to be messy and no one is really going to have a good answer as to how to magically make the mess go away. I think we should stop expecting that they will, and focus on whether they have the quality to keep us from future messes.


[Published by me as a letter to the War Room on Salon.com. Editor's Choice!]

They do have nice suits.

I'm a Liberal. This is well known. But I have always respected the conservative movement.

First, I am also a Libra, which if you believe any of that stuff means I'm keen to see both sides of everything. I believe that if you're someone who loves this country and are interested in developing policies to help it, then we have more in common than not. And I can respect a well-thought-out line of reasoning even if I still disagree with it in the end because I believe in different goals. (The fact that you and I are interested in discussing "the role of government in the modern age and the meaning of its social contract with its citizens" has already set us apart from the masses, who are more interested in who's running for American Idol than American President.)

Second, I once worked for the Republican Party, as an open Democrat. Some of them were indeed crazy. But I worked for two men and one woman who were kind, smart, decent, and conservative, and they enjoyed talking to me. (Again, we had more in common simply because we wanted to talk about it.) They patiently explained their point of view without slandering the left, and I learned a lot. I came to really respect the point of view of fiscal conservatives. I kept my own beliefs about the nature of the relationship between government and its people, but I have no trouble seeing the other side.

Third, my high school friend's dad was a conservative state senator in Florida, and he went to our church. I know that a lot of people have a pretty low opinion of politicians, and many on my side would dock points for him being on the right, but he was a nice and honest man, and this formed many of my feelings about politicians at a young age.

All of this is to say, after 8 years of "my President" (I think everyone has one, the first one they felt passionate about) and with a pretty bland candidate in Gore, I was willing to let the other side have a shot for a while. I confess I never liked Bush. He reminded me of men I knew, men I knew to stay away from. In fact, he reminded me a lot of a man who came up to me at closing time at the bar I worked-- drunk, vomit on his shirt, knees under his frat-boy cargo shorts skinned and freely bleeding-- who hit on me. Ick. So yes, Bush has always made me queasy.

But the country seemed to be humming along so well, I didn't think anything too bad could happen. And Clinton had championed some fiscally conservative causes, like Welfare Reform and NAFTA, so the parties didn't seem all that different. I thought we'd see a continuing paring down of government services, which can be painful but not necessarily bad. (Like I said, I can see why they would want smaller government, I can see how they could logically justify and execute it, even though I respectfully disagree on many points.)

I knew that they wanted to "bring the grownups back into the White House". I knew that Clinton's administration was seen as an overgrown dorm party. Keep in mind, this was the 1990s, when all over the business community, a radical "youth movement" was changing the face of the workplace. Dress codes went from suits to jeans, foozball tables went into break rooms, and bean bag chairs went into amorphous "team work areas". At the same time, this young band of pols moved into the White House with their backpacks instead of briefcases (an icon of which was on Josh's shoulder through all 8 years of The West Wing), meetings over open pizza boxes in the Oval Office, and a First Lady who dared to actually get involved in policy. The Old Guard, the "suits", were incensed. It didn't help that at the end of a long investigation there was found to be sex too. And so one of the promises of the Bush II Administration was to bring back the suits, literally and figuratively. Surely all of this casual behavior wasn't good for the country, they thought. I think it drove them crazy that despite all of this, the Clinton Administration was actually effective. So they promised, and I don't blame people for wanting this after the scandal, to "restore dignity", or "bring the grownups back". And I was interested to see what the "grownups" would do with it.

I knew they valued secrecy, but with the Freedom of Information Act, I didn't think they could hide that much from us.

I knew that they were oil men, I just thought these energy men would want to be in on the ground floor of the next phase of energy development.

I knew they had co-opted (or were allowing themselves to be co-opted by) the extreme religious right (ERR), but I thought honestly that the joke would be on the ERR (which it's turning out to be).

I knew there were neocons sharpening their knives in think tanks, but I didn't think they'd get the chance to remake the world they way they wanted. Think tanks are not real life, and it's often easier to imagine how you would do something in politics than to actually do it, when you have opposing ideas pressing back against you, and a planet of real nations to deal with.

I knew they were hawks, but I thought that since we had developed and cherished the Powell Doctrine, if we were forced into a war it would be swift and with a clear mission and exit strategy. And they installed Powell himself as the Secretary of State, so I thought that would keep us in check.

And I knew that they desperately wanted to go back into Iraq. For 8 years they listened to their base complain that the one failing of the Bush I years was that they "didn't finish the job" in Iraq by taking out Hussein. (Remember, I worked for them in the first few Clinton years, and I listened to them complain about this.) I knew that they wanted to "right" that "wrong", but I didn't really think they'd get the chance. I mean, the only way they could justify going back was if Hussein attacked someone else (for which he didn't have the capability) or, you know, something crazy like Arabs attacking the US. Oops.

What I'm trying to say is that I was willing to give them a shot, to see what their policies would do. I was even willing to see them get the Congress too-- for decades there had been gridlock blamed on having an Executive of one party and a Legislature of another, what would happen if they got it all and could really show us what kind of country their policies, unhindered, would bring us? What if they could remake the country for the better? That's all I want for my beloved country.

So while part of me, the part that cringed while Clinton slipped the noose around his own neck for his lynching, the part of me that wants to throw rotten tomatoes at the gerry-mandering hack Tom DeLay, is happy to be dancing on the grave of the GOP, there is a much bigger part of me that weeps for the destruction of our country and the collapse of the promise of a new vision.

Sydney Blumenthal has a new article in Salon ("The GOP Begins to Implode") in which he delineates all the factions that are splintering apart, and how the immigration issue is adding to the quake. The GOP is finding out what it means to have a big tent-- all the circus animals eventually start to eat each other. Here are some of his salient points:

• The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community.

• The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate.

• The evangelical religious right is paralyzed while the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as a mobilizing force behind the mass demonstrations of millions of Hispanic immigrants.

• Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism, always lurking beneath the surface, has filled the vacuum.

• Fear of the Other is being displaced onto the traditional nativist target: immigrants.

The "grownups" have been terrible stewards of this country. It turns out that the alternative to being young and idealistic is being old and corrupt. They have lied, leaked, evaded, spied on us, and put dangerously under-qualified cronies in critical positions in the government. They have very nice suits, but they won't roll up their sleeves. In this culture of lawlessness, which included the "K Street Project" (forcing all lobbying firms to hire only Republicans), some of them took bribes in cash and goods.

They insisted that conservation was against the national interest (QUE???) and that drilling in Alaska and "buying" our own "gas station" in Iraq would solve our oil problems-- until it didn't, and now they are singing a false note in trying to take back everything they've ever said without sounding like liars.

They even lied to the ERR, making such hay out of the "threat" of gay marriage (rumor has it, this election cycle it will be the spectre of "gay adoption" that looms), taking their "free milk" of votes and walking away without buying the cow. (Ironic, isn't it, since abstinence is their sole sex ed, that they didn't see that one coming?)

Turns out that neoconservativism regarding domestic issues is actually for big government and domestic spending. (Well, duh, it has to financially support its militaristic foreign policy somehow.) I think this was a shock to many fiscal conservatives that didn't know some of their best friends were working to cross purposes. George Will still hasn't gotten that look of shock off his face. Wikipedia in its definition says, neocons "sympathized with a non-traditional foreign policy agenda that was less deferential to traditional conceptions of diplomacy and international law and less inclined to compromise principles even if that meant unilateral action." Turns out, that means pissing everyone off. I would go farther to say that it specifically involved remaking the entire Middle East into "people we could deal with"-- without noticing that the people who lived there didn't want to be remade and would virulently hate us for meddling in the wrong places while not meddling enough in the Palestian/Israeli conflict, making them even more impossible to deal with. (Now even the more rational states can't be seen with us for fear of attracting that hate.)

Making Colin Powell the Secretary of State, it turns out, was an effort to marginalize him. Under a plan in which one is "less deferential to traditional concepts of diplomacy and international law", the Secretary of State is a joke. The real power in a neocon administration is the Secretary of Defense, in which position they installed the neo-est, hawkest member of their cabal, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is one of those smarmy, arrogant people that make you feel like they are the only ones with the answers, and you're an idiot. (Not just the kind who think you are an idiot, but the kind that really makes you feel like you must be.) And when he's working in the vacuum of not being in power, I'm sure he convinced everyone (and apparently still has the President convinced) that he really did have the answers and they were idiots (because this kind of guy is really persuasive). But reality has borne out that he's just a blowhard. His arrogant, dismissive speaking has devolved into defensive whining, which oddly matches the President's defensive whining ("This is haa-ard!") Cheney has a similar intimidating veneer-- he's the quintessential stoic father, the leader of the "grownups", who makes you feel like he's the adult who understands better than you do but, it turns out, he's just feeling his way through life like anyone else.

Lastly, it's surprising to learn that the hawks are terrible at war! It's like having a group on the school fundraising committee insist on a dance-off with the rival school-- but it turns out they can't dance. We all assumed, including the right, that these men (and women, Ms. Rice) who were planning for years to go back into Iraq, who were planning for years to remake the Middle East without "traditional diplomacy" and with "unilateral [military] action" were good military strategists. It turns out the good military strategists (the best kind being the kind that try to keep us out of military action, and then only with a clear mission and exit strategy) were in the State Department being ignored. So while it's possible that the neocon vision of remaking the Middle East might (and I stress might) have worked with good military planning, we will never know because they bungled it from start to finish.

I should point out that I am referring only to the civilian military planners. The military strategists within the military are quite good at their jobs and have done an amazing job on the day-to-day planning (the small picture) while being hobbled by civilian idiots on major planning (the big picture).

You might notice that I haven't mentioned the bungling of the Katrina disaster. While this is the most blatant example of incompetence on the most basic governmental level (we might argue about health care or public education, but this is the kind of thing we all expect a government to handle for us), and it stems directly from failures in the Administration-- namely cronyism and the dismantling of Clinton's shiny revamped FEMA into a shell of its former glory, just in time for the worst disaster in 50 years or more)-- I never dreamed this could happen. The point of this essay is to say, "I was willing to give them a shot, but it turns out their ideas and the execution of those ideas were really, really bad." But I never in my life gave one thought to an organization like FEMA as a political football, or even a topic of reasoned debate. I thought that at least, our government would protect and serve in the time of a natural disaster. Turns out I was wrong.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I was a young adult not that much younger than most of the Clinton Administration. While the pizza boxes in the Oval Office didn't bother me, the sex scandal did. While I wanted another Democrat administration, I was willing to let the "grownups" back in, because if the "kids" could do this well, maybe the "grownups" could do even better. I was wrong. We all were.

One thing you can say about them, though, they do have very nice suits.