Michael Currie Schaffer in a new article in The New Republic raises a great question. In public life, Bush's cronies never faced consequences for screw-ups and misdeeds. Will that still be true once Bush leaves office?
But there is shame, if not for the Bushies, then at least for the folks who would hire them. A year from now, as the whole squad prepares to follow Bolton and Feith out the door, it might be worth taking some time out from the new, post-1.20.09 world and casting an eye back on the folks who created and enabled the Bush disaster. It presents the sort of opportunity that, in the hands of the well-organized political brawlers of the right, could lead to the establishment of a well-funded watchdog group monitoring university hiring announcements and speakers-circuit lectures. Why can't the angry left match that? The group could gin up alumni letters to trustees of universities that hire failed Bushies, prompt few angry shareholder calls to the corporations who fund the think-tanks where others of them land, or just send out press releases about the "controversy" accompanying every trade association convention speech by a former torture advocate.
I think this is something the netroots should commit itself to doing! Michael Currie Schaffer writes later"Sure, it would be a case of mean-spiritedly hounding people well after the fact. Yet it would ultimately be about ensuring accountability, which ought to still matter even after Bush leaves town." But wasn't this one of the reasons we empowered the Democrats to take control of congress? ACCOUNTABILITY If our elected officials won't do this shouldn't we?
Think about this. Remember Tom Delay and the K Street Project? Wikipedia called the K Street Project an "effort by the Republican Party (GOP) to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials." They in other words removed people from their jobs simply because they were Democrats! The idea was to project GOP power into the lobbying world and make sure that corporation were giving all their money to Republicans. Do we really lack the back bone to not enforce this back on people for actual cause?
By historical standards, there's nothing unusual about this. Whatever their ideology, top officials always move on to teaching, writing, and pontificating once their boss's term expires. For the most part, it fits their skill set a lot better than, say, taking jobs at high-end restaurants or embarking on careers as fashion designers. Washington has no shortage of policy-focused think tanks; the rest of the country has no shortage of academic institutions who'd love the reflected glory of visiting professors who answer to "General" or "Ambassador" or "Mr. Secretary." It's hardly a new phenomenon: Robert McNamara, perhaps the most reviled architect of the Vietnam war, landed the same high-profile World Bank post as Wolfowitz. (Of course, he lasted a bit longer).
Do we want this group of corrupt, incompetent people teaching our next generation?
Even if it were unobjectionable that a demonstrably failed public official be handed an academic gown and a platform to teach the next generation, the sui generis nature of the Bush administration makes the octennial drift from government to establishmentarian think-tankery particularly troubling. In foreign policy, where predecessors from both parties mainly tweaked bipartisan policy in past administrations--muscle up the Cold War here, chill it out there, etc.--the Bushies embraced a radically redefined idea of the United States in the world: Preemptive war, unilateralism, torture, and a large permanent troop presence in the Middle East, among other things. Had the results been a success, their architects could snatch up the nicest offices on campuses and corporate headquarters from coast to coast. They failed, though, at the cost of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Should the radicals who dreamt up the policies go on to the same bland comfort as their predecessors?
If the Bush administration were a hospital, its officials wouldn't have gone on to teach medicine after their benighted institution finally closed up shop. Rather, they'd have lost their medical licenses--perhaps for embracing unconventional and unproven surgical techniques, or perhaps for just being asleep in the O.R. Alas, there's no license to opine about foreign policy.
This is something to think about?