Bush's hacks
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/14/bushs_hacks/
THE SENATE confirmation hearings of John Roberts are in the eye of a perfect storm of American hypocrisy. It is largely assumed that Roberts will be confirmed despite his animus for affirmative action for people of color. In 1981 as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, he wrote that affirmative action ''required the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates."
Such sentiments will not sink his chances for the high court, not in a nation where affirmative action of inadequately prepared white men is so rampant that we let them manage our two worst disasters.
There is Hurricane Katrina, where Michael Brown resigned this week as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brown had no emergency management experience and did not know that the New Orleans convention center was reeking in squalor, despite media reports.
Days before the resignation, he was kicked out of New Orleans by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. That was the unqualified calling the unqualified ''unqualified." The natural-disaster-minded FEMA was rolled into the terrorist-minded Homeland Security two years ago but Chertoff had no experience in emergency management either. When National Public Radio asked Chertoff about CNN reports on conditions at the convention center, he said: ''If you talk to someone and you get a rumor, or you get someone's anecdotal version of something, I think it's dangerous to extrapolate it all over the place. . . . I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water."
Brown was at FEMA because of the old-boy network. He was hired as a general counsel by fellow Oklahoman and then-FEMA head Joe Allbaugh. Allbaugh had no qualifications for FEMA other than being a chief Bush operative for a decade. Allbaugh hired Brown even though Brown's last major job was an Arabian horse show commissioner.
With such incompetence in place for Katrina, Bush, a self-admitted academic underachiever who was a clear beneficiary of legacy admissions, followed up the stupid comments of his hacks with proclamations worthy of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Despite years of scientific warnings and newspaper stories about the potentially catastrophic effects of a hurricane, Bush said, ''I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
This follows an amazing lack of anticipation over what would happen in Iraq, after an invasion and occupation where the architects were for the most part well-connected white men who never spent one day in combat. They gave no thought to the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in the invasion or to the nearly 1,900 US soldiers who have died.
There was Vice President Dick ''Five-Deferments" Cheney, who ballyhooed that we would be ''welcomed as liberators" and that the insurgency is in its ''last throes." There was Defense Secretary Donald ''We-Know-Where-the-Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction-Are" Rumsfeld. He flew jets for the Navy but never saw combat. There was former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul ''Wildly-Off-The-Mark" Wolfowitz, who trashed the assessment by the Army's chief of staff that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to stabilize Iraq.
Bush's idea of diversity in this affirmative action for no-combat military experts was his African-American former national security adviser, Condoleezza ''Those 16-Words-Are-A-Data-Point" Rice. Rice, now secretary of state, was in the lead of defusing criticism over Bush's discredited claim that Saddam was seeking nuclear weapons material from Africa.
Hardly by coincidence, the top player in the Bush administration who was the most reluctant to go to war was an African-American man who saw combat, former Secretary of State Colin Powell. It was Powell who urged his fellow Republicans at the 2000 Republican national convention to understand the cynicism of African-Americans when ''some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education, but you hardly hear a whimper when it's affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax code with preferences for special interests."
Such cynicism is exploding again in America's face. While we are about to have a new chief justice who condemns affirmative action for black and brown kids, affirmative action for privileged white men has led to decisions that have cost this nation and the planet tens of thousands of lives. Of course Bush could not envision the breach of the levees. His form of affirmative action left him with no one of vision to show him the way.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
posted by Nadir at 9:06 AM
7 Comments:
Yo, Nadir: Bush is getting a swell of criticism from the right, including for hack-erism. Check out this from Michelle Malkin.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/mm20050921.shtml
All the free marketeers are also pretty upset about his high spending, and some of us oppose his Homeland Security airport bonanza.
Yes, Bush has hired unqualified whites for crucial jobs. Surely you don't use this as justification for Affirmative Action? If AA ended, unquilifed blacks would still get hired, but not because they are black.
Race is a maddening subject. Blacks in general think that whites think about blacks, and do so with negative intepretations and intentions. White liberals believe this about "other" whites. Meanwhile, whites in general think rarely about blacks, rarely with malice, and mostly with hopes that blacks will succeed.
One thing that certainly does upset non-liberal whites is the constant branding of whites as racist, and the labeling of so many factors as racist. Why doesn't this bother white liberals? Because they interpret such talk as always about "other" whites, with which they do not associate, but whom they are certain exist and flourish.
PS: This blog site is horrible. I'm not referring to Nadir's dark background. I'm referring to blogger.com. Can somebody find us a better one?
Paul says: "If AA ended, unquilifed blacks would still get hired, but not because they are black."
Qualified blacks aren't even being hired in America. The black unemployment rate is 20%. Black people - qualified or unqualified - certainly are not being hired in significant numbers, so the arguments that you and others use against affirmative action are largely irrelevant.
The point of this post is that unqualified whites have been hired simply because of their connections. It certainly isn't an argument for affirmative action. It merely uses right-wing opposition to affirmative action to prove the point.
1) Please justify your claim that the high black unemployment rate involves the exclusion of qualified blacks from the workforce. I know of no unemployed black people who have marketable employment credentials. However, I know gobs of lazy black folks who choose not to assert themselves in life, perhaps because they erroneously believe that "this is a racist country in which black people who work hard are none the less excluded from opportunities because they are black." I would really like to meet some hard working, assertive black peole who cannot find jobs... or, more specifically, have a harder time finding jobs than properly matched whites, Asians, and Indians.
2) The argument against AA has nothing to do with eliminating the hiring of unqualified people. Rather, opposition to AA seeks to eliminate race as an official hiring criteria enforced by government programs.
Let me try this another way: AA causes unqualified people to get hired because of their race. This is one negative consequence of these policies. This does not mean that people who oppose AA do not hire unqualified people, it merely means they want to eliminate policies that promote this practice on racial grounds. Without AA, unqualified blacks will join whites and Asians in getting hired based on their connections, charms, and good luck, rather than a government program that labels them as belonging to a special "race". There is a term for this: racial equality.
But really, Paul. Is there any indication that affirmative action accounts for MORE unqualified minorities to be hired than non-AA hirees who are found to be unqualified or incompetent?
Being a beneficiary of affirmative action in past jobs, I know that any hiree still has to be judged by a hiring manager as qualified. If not, the company is not compusled to hire that individual. If they choose to hire an unqualified individual because of race (minority or not) that is due to the incompetence of the hiring manager, not because of affirmative action.
When I was a college student at Middle Tennessee State University, I was asked to serve on the search committee that interviewed and hired a new dean for the School of Mass Communications. I am certain that my inclusion in this panel was to help confirm that minorities were included in the interview pool. Again, there was no compulsion to hire minorities, but it was crucial that they were interviewed.
In higher education, students are provided with extra points for race in some instances (as in the former UofM system), but they still have to meet certain minimum requirements. Those requirements may be relaxed somewhat for minorities, which I agree, isn't necessarily best for the students, but the intention is to right former (and current) discrimination, and to offer opportunity to students who otherwise may not have that opportunity.
Some white students may be on the short end of that stick, but those same students may also lose their spots to legacy students and other non-minority students. You can't blame affirmative action for that.
Paul says: "1) Please justify your claim that the high black unemployment rate involves the exclusion of qualified blacks from the workforce. I know of no unemployed black people who have marketable employment credentials. However, I know gobs of lazy black folks who choose not to assert themselves in life, perhaps because they erroneously believe that "this is a racist country in which black people who work hard are none the less excluded from opportunities because they are black." I would really like to meet some hard working, assertive black peole who cannot find jobs... or, more specifically, have a harder time finding jobs than properly matched whites, Asians, and Indians."
Due to layoffs and downsizing there are thousands of workers (white, black and otherwise) who are qualified but unemployed or underemployed. Is this due to race? Not necessarily, but studies show that blacks will not be hired as often as whites even when they are equally qualified.
Blacks are more often the victims of underfunded public schools whose budgets are determined by the income of the residents of their neighborhoods. I know you are a fan of vouchers as a remedy for this situation, but the use of vouchers could never benefit the vast majority of students.
Paul says: "2) The argument against AA has nothing to do with eliminating the hiring of unqualified people. Rather, opposition to AA seeks to eliminate race as an official hiring criteria enforced by government programs."
Affirmative action as an official practice is designed to help eliminate race as an UNOFFICIAL hiring criteria. It has not proven to be completely effective in this regard, and the system isn't without flaws. The system should be reformed but not eliminated until there is a greater degree of parity and equality in the U.S.
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