Washington Post - Even Handed but Wrong Headed

BrooklynDodger intends not to be a media critic. That said, WaPo really bites on this one.

Michael Brown has mud on his hands – the failures of FEMA cost lives, and untold extra damage to New Orleans. Not as bad a fault as starving the flood walls in NOLA, but still a serious offense. Maybe even not as bad as his predecessor, Allpaugh, steering contracts to Halliburton et al.

Nevertheless, the Clinton era failures are PR problems. Background checks on White House staff – as if the Bushies don’t do political payback, and a helicopter ride, vs. ignoring starvation, thirst and other evils?

Give the Dodger a break.


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Flops Are No Fluke in the Annals of Political Payback
Ex-FEMA Chief Joins Long List of Unsuccessful Appointees
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff WriterMonday, September 19, 2005; Page A15
Long before Michael D. Brown became the poster boy for the overwhelmed and lightly qualified political appointee in Washington, there was Craig Livingstone, a former barroom bouncer who dreamed of bigger things and found them in the Clinton White House.
Livingstone parlayed a stint as an advance man for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign into a White House job as head of personnel security. He relished the clout of handling background checks of White House employees, swaggering around the West Wing in dark glasses and attending film premieres with beautiful women.
It was all a prologue to a fall. Livingstone quit in June 1996 amid a scandal over the improper requisitioning of more than 400 FBI background reports on employees from previous administrations, most of them Republicans, purportedly in a misguided attempt to clean up the White House access list. Within a few years, he was driving a limousine to make ends meet.
…
And so it was that in 2001, Bush nominated as ambassador to France Howard H. Leach, a San Francisco financier who raised $100,000 for Bush's presidential bid but did not speak French. (The French noticed.)
There was Deborah Gore Dean, a Georgetown socialite and the niece of onetime Maryland GOP leader Louise Gore, who used her family and social connections to land a top staff job under then-Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr. at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1984.
In 1993, she was convicted of funneling federal funds to GOP insiders as part of a $2 billion influence-peddling scandal at HUD. Sentenced to 21 months in prison, Dean, who became an antiques dealer, stayed out of jail through appeals until 2002, when she was resentenced to six months of home confinement.
…
Take Christopher B. Burnham, a former investment banker and Bush fundraiser who this year was tapped to be undersecretary for the department of management at the United Nations. Burnham caused a stir in July when he said that, professionally, his "primary loyalty is to the United States." The United Nations quickly issued a "clarification on his behalf," saying that Burnham took an oath of loyalty to the United Nations and "understands that his professional obligation is to the United Nations and the Secretary-General."
During the Clinton era, White House director of administration David Watkins lasted just over a year before he was forced to resign in May 1994 after famously taking the presidential helicopter for a golf outing near Camp David. …