Tonya Harding won the award for the Most Pathetic Plea For Fairness in the 20th Century when, after being accused of hiring a thug to break the leg of her rival Nancy Kerrigan, she begged for fairness from judges after a lace broke during an olympic skating competition (Youtube link of grand moment of hypocrisy). It looks like Paul Wolfowitz, who played a major role in lying us into a disastrous war and who used his power to get his girlfriend (and others - see after the fold) cushy jobs at the World Bank, is looking for fairness and mercy from the World Bank board, putting an early claim in for the 21st Century Award for the Most Pathetic Plea For Fairness.
Paul Wolfowitz made an emotional appeal to stay on as World Bank president in a last pitch before the bank's board decides whether he has the credibility to lead the poverty-fighting institution.
They are still trying to pull this nonsense that the rest of the world is greatly concerned that Wolfowitz is not being treated fairly. That is bullshit. Like Bolton at the UN, the rest of the world can not believe that he was put there in the first place and that he still remains. He is emblamatic of the way the Bushies have unapologetically siezed power and littered governnment with their unqualified cronies. Juan Cole had a piece in Salon the other day, showing that his girlfriend was not the only one that Wofowitz has showed favoritism to at the World Bank.
Soon after becoming head of the World Bank, Wolfowitz lapsed into his typical favoritism, even while he was, ironically, decrying the technique as practiced by governments of the global South. Instead of having an open search for some key positions and allowing for promotions from within, Wolfowitz simply installed Republicans from the Bush administration in high positions with enormous salaries. He brought Kevin Kellems from Dick Cheney's office (where he had been communications director) and gave him a tax-free salary said to have been as high as $250,000 a year. As Wolfowitz's new senior advisor, Kellems was leap-frogged over hundreds of officials with serious credentials in development work, something about which he knew little. When representing Cheney, Kellems went to great lengths to defend the vice president's implausible conspiracy theory linking Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Another controversial Wolfowitz appointment was Robin Cleveland, whom he made his assistant. She had been an aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell and then associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. She had been implicated in a corruption and nepotism scandal at the Pentagon, but the Department of Defense had determined it did not have jurisdiction to investigate her. In 2003, while at the OMB, she had lobbied then Secretary of the Air Force James Roche to get her brother a job at defense contractor Northrop Grumman, where Roche had been an executive. Though, like Kellems, she lacked experience in international development, she also received a reported quarter of a million dollars a year in compensation at the World Bank. And also like Kellems, she is alleged to have been an abrasive and abusive boss.
Wolfowitz appointee Juan José Daboub quietly began changing World Bank policy on contraception, presumably as a favor to the Bush administration, which depends heavily on the Christian right for support. Daboub, who had been close to the right-wing government of El Salvador, ordered all references to family planning removed from a strategy document for Madagascar. Bank officials were said by the Financial Times to have been afraid that the World Bank's long-standing focus on contraception in forestalling disease was being changed by Daboub, and that poor women would suffer as a result. When the story surfaced, Wolfowitz told National Public Radio that the bank had made no changes in policy on contraceptives.
Experienced, high-level World Bank officials began resigning in droves as they saw Wolfowitz institute a reign of cronies with little development experience and massive salaries. The management style of the newcomers, cliquish among themselves and harsh toward outsiders, alienated those who remained.
None of these appointments, however unpopular, proved Wolfowitz's undoing. It was the provisions he made for his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, that finally blew up in his face.
Here is to hoping that the World Bank board does not let Wolfowitz skate.