Yet more wankery about the impending demise of the Bush Administration
I know this is something I've ranted about a fair bit already, but to celebrate the fact that it is now less than a month to the changeover, I'm going to give my personal argument against the politicization of government bureaucracy in general and the current fucktards leading the free world in particular. Lotus, Quakey, Alex, and Shayne have already heard most of this one.
First thing you need to understand is the difference between politicians and civil servants. Now, this is usually an easy visual distinction to make as the politicians are in nice suits and smile a lot and the civil servants are more likely to look like escapees from the Dweeb Reformatory and tend to count beans very nervously. If you will allow me the conceit of a massive fucking generalization.
There are a lot of other distinctions that matter too, though. Civil servants tend not to get paid a whole heck of a lot. They adhere to a lot of rules that politicians don't have to about not endorsing candidates in the office and avoiding any kind of nepotism or favoritism. Politicians are generally only at one level of government until they have enough power to move onto the next or worm their way into some lucrative spot in the private sector. Civil servants will probably stay in the same branch, even in the same office, for the entirety of their career, quietly melding with the carpet and paneling. Politicians have stances because they are convenient for the upcoming election. Civil servants often have very deeply held beliefs (we're talking "wild-eyed homeless person" faith levels) around what they do for a living.
Obviously, MASSIVE FUCKING GENERALIZATION. I know that there are civil servants out there who abuse their power and those politicize their jobs and those who are just plain stupid and have long since risen to the level of their incompetence. They exist and there are plenty of them. ON THE WHOLE, HOWEVER, civil servants are surprisingly dedicated people who do some astoundingly boring but very very necessary jobs.
How do I know this? Well, my parents work as civil servants, all of my work experience (and thus my coworkers) has been of that nature, and a fair number of other friends, relatives, acquaintances are civil servants too.
Now, low-level civil servants are the worker ants of any bureaucracy. They may not make a lot of interesting decisions, but they are the ones who get done the real business of reigning in corporations and building highways and giving health care to the elderly and all the other things that our government is there to DO. They are there to do so no matter who is in power so on the whole they keep their heads down, don't air their personal opinions of the political appointees who change more often than Michael Jackson's nose, and keep doing about the same thing through every administration. And they are quite good at it, too--programs headed by civil servants are rated much more successful on average than those headed by political appointees, even when the appointees have more impressive resumes.
In other words, it takes a LOT to piss civil servants off enough for them to talk mutiny. It takes an exceptionally meddlesome and hostile administration.
Well, this summer and fall I heard civil servants in three entirely separate government offices complain about just that.
The first to complain was my mother, working Department of Defense personnel administration. She told me that the idiocy of the executive orders regarding terrorism, the two wars, and immigration-control-via-crazy-ID-requirements had finally reached a point where she would feel compelled to find a private-sector job if there wasn't a bit of domestic regime change. And my mother is about as easy to REALLY piss off as a particularly mellow bumblebee.
The second group of malcontents was my coworkers at the EPA. They were in the particular division that deals with air pollution coming from vehicles and the lot of them sincerely believed that CO2 pollution and global warming were in their regulatory mandate under the Clean Air Act. They told the Bush Administration this in all honesty. The Bush Administration responded by at first REFUSING TO ACCEPT THE EMAIL that contained their report, and then by burying it in a flood pseudoscience from people more willing to lick boots. They were very much hoping for an domestic change of regime that would let them actually do what they were there for.
The third group was at the National Endowment for the Humanities. For a school project that involved following up on NEH grants to archival preservation programs, we (a group of extremely nonthreatening American citizen archives students) emailed to ask them for documentation about the grants...which are taxpayer funded. We were flat-out refused and told to file a Freedom of Information Act request and wait six months. Our professor happened to personally know the man we had contacted and emailed him privately to ask who was eating his porridge. The guy replied that their legal counsel was a political appointee and the most incredibly paranoid fucktard any of the civil servants had ever seen. They were hoping for relief in the form of, YOU GUESSED IT!, a domestic regime change.
LONG STORY SHORT: BUSH ADMINISTRATION DELIGHTS IN THROWING SPANNERS IN FUNCTIONAL GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS. CIVIL SERVANTS STICK PINS IN REPUBLICAN VOODOO DOLLS.
First thing you need to understand is the difference between politicians and civil servants. Now, this is usually an easy visual distinction to make as the politicians are in nice suits and smile a lot and the civil servants are more likely to look like escapees from the Dweeb Reformatory and tend to count beans very nervously. If you will allow me the conceit of a massive fucking generalization.
There are a lot of other distinctions that matter too, though. Civil servants tend not to get paid a whole heck of a lot. They adhere to a lot of rules that politicians don't have to about not endorsing candidates in the office and avoiding any kind of nepotism or favoritism. Politicians are generally only at one level of government until they have enough power to move onto the next or worm their way into some lucrative spot in the private sector. Civil servants will probably stay in the same branch, even in the same office, for the entirety of their career, quietly melding with the carpet and paneling. Politicians have stances because they are convenient for the upcoming election. Civil servants often have very deeply held beliefs (we're talking "wild-eyed homeless person" faith levels) around what they do for a living.
Obviously, MASSIVE FUCKING GENERALIZATION. I know that there are civil servants out there who abuse their power and those politicize their jobs and those who are just plain stupid and have long since risen to the level of their incompetence. They exist and there are plenty of them. ON THE WHOLE, HOWEVER, civil servants are surprisingly dedicated people who do some astoundingly boring but very very necessary jobs.
How do I know this? Well, my parents work as civil servants, all of my work experience (and thus my coworkers) has been of that nature, and a fair number of other friends, relatives, acquaintances are civil servants too.
Now, low-level civil servants are the worker ants of any bureaucracy. They may not make a lot of interesting decisions, but they are the ones who get done the real business of reigning in corporations and building highways and giving health care to the elderly and all the other things that our government is there to DO. They are there to do so no matter who is in power so on the whole they keep their heads down, don't air their personal opinions of the political appointees who change more often than Michael Jackson's nose, and keep doing about the same thing through every administration. And they are quite good at it, too--programs headed by civil servants are rated much more successful on average than those headed by political appointees, even when the appointees have more impressive resumes.
In other words, it takes a LOT to piss civil servants off enough for them to talk mutiny. It takes an exceptionally meddlesome and hostile administration.
Well, this summer and fall I heard civil servants in three entirely separate government offices complain about just that.
The first to complain was my mother, working Department of Defense personnel administration. She told me that the idiocy of the executive orders regarding terrorism, the two wars, and immigration-control-via-crazy-ID-requirements had finally reached a point where she would feel compelled to find a private-sector job if there wasn't a bit of domestic regime change. And my mother is about as easy to REALLY piss off as a particularly mellow bumblebee.
The second group of malcontents was my coworkers at the EPA. They were in the particular division that deals with air pollution coming from vehicles and the lot of them sincerely believed that CO2 pollution and global warming were in their regulatory mandate under the Clean Air Act. They told the Bush Administration this in all honesty. The Bush Administration responded by at first REFUSING TO ACCEPT THE EMAIL that contained their report, and then by burying it in a flood pseudoscience from people more willing to lick boots. They were very much hoping for an domestic change of regime that would let them actually do what they were there for.
The third group was at the National Endowment for the Humanities. For a school project that involved following up on NEH grants to archival preservation programs, we (a group of extremely nonthreatening American citizen archives students) emailed to ask them for documentation about the grants...which are taxpayer funded. We were flat-out refused and told to file a Freedom of Information Act request and wait six months. Our professor happened to personally know the man we had contacted and emailed him privately to ask who was eating his porridge. The guy replied that their legal counsel was a political appointee and the most incredibly paranoid fucktard any of the civil servants had ever seen. They were hoping for relief in the form of, YOU GUESSED IT!, a domestic regime change.
LONG STORY SHORT: BUSH ADMINISTRATION DELIGHTS IN THROWING SPANNERS IN FUNCTIONAL GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS. CIVIL SERVANTS STICK PINS IN REPUBLICAN VOODOO DOLLS.