2000 George Bush: "We will bring honor and accountability to government"

[yesthattom]

Yeah, that FUCKING Bill Clinton can’t keep his god damn dick in his pants! Well, Amerikka, we’ll be different! We aren’t gonna run this country like a bunch of fuckin’ frat boys! Vote for us ‘cause we hate government, thus we’ll run it right! Just like the restaurant down the street that you love so much that has the owner that hates to cook food! That makes sense, right?

Oh, and when disaster strikes in a blue state with a lot of black people not only will we delay 5 days and let those people starve, but...

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found at least $1 billion in disaster relief payments by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were improper and potentially fraudulent because the recipients provided incomplete or incorrect information when they registered for assistance. (GAO report)

Besides the bottle of champagne, the GAO uncovered records showing $1,000 from a FEMA debit card went to a Houston, Texas, divorce lawyer, $600 was spent in a strip club, and $400 bought “adult erotica products,” all of which auditors concluded were “not necessary to satisfy legitimate disaster needs.”(Full Story)

“It bothers me as an American that resources that were intended to help victims of this tremendous tragedy were spent this way,” said Hooters Chairman Bob Brooks, referring to the champagne from Hooters.

(Quoted from CNN)

Now stop voting for that guy that can’t keep his dick in his pants, and vote for us. Getting your dick sucked by a chubby chick is DISGUSTING! Gotta get rid of that man and vote for a Republican! We’ll just spend a BILLION DOLLARS of relief money on divorces, strip clubs and porn. Ya hoo!

Comments

[crs.livejournal.com]

'cause Bush personally handed that debit card to Mr. divorce lawyer.

How is this billion dollar boondoggle something that wouldn't have happened no matter who was in charge? I mean, besides the way the Republicans screwed up the early stages of the effort - once the debit cards handouts start, how does "who's in charge" affect this story?

I don't like the guys in charge either, but ... this seems disingenuous to assume that somehow the Democrats in charge would have had some sort of magic anti-fraud field.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent question. "Wouldn't this have happened in any administration?"

The answer is: No

First of all, there were no such charges like this under 8 years of Clinton's administration. During that time FEMA has plenty of emergencies (Remember Floyd?) and no such scandal happened. Don't you think that if a single Hooters Girl was tipped on a FEMA credit card Clinton's enemies would have gone apeshit and brought it to the press? Wouldn't there have been FEMAGate or something?

So, the answer is "no".

But there's more to the story.

When Clinton took over, FEMA was the laughing stock of the federal government. Badly run, inefficient. Clinton made the decision to reform it. Clinton brought in new people at the top with heavy emergency management experience, and they cleaned house. They hired based on skills, not politics. They started doing simulations, disaster drills, and learned a lot from that. They instituted system-wide best practices. When Clinton left the White House, FEMA was considered the best run and most efficient department.

When Bush campaigned, he campaigned hard with the krazy konservative krowd and militias that believed in conspiracy theories that said that FEMA was a secret ploy to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship. The conspiracy is based on

EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.

In short, the president would declare a fictional emergency, FEMA would take over. Since Congress can't complain for 6 months, he would use this time to install himself as President For Life. Ta da!

Bush campaigned heavily with these people, promising to disintegrate FEMA, or make it powerless.

Bush also promised that he would give a lot of no-bid contracts to his cronies to take over a lot of FEMA functions.

After reducing FEMA's funding and putting cronies in charge, we see how badly run it was by the time Katrina happened.

I can't believe that a BILLION DOLLARS in unauthorized spending would have happened under Clinton. He reformed FEMA because he knows that a well-run government agency can help people.


A BILLION DOLLARS! Imagine how many new schools could be built with that money!

[nooks.livejournal.com]

'cause Bush personally handed that debit card to Mr. divorce lawyer.

Okay, Bush isn't personally responsible for the actions of a bunch of other people.

But by the same argument, he hasn't created any jobs for this country. Business owners and job-seekers did that. He didn't capture Saddam Hussein. The 4th Infantry Division did that. He hasn't caught or killed a single terrorist. The CIA, NSA, FBI, and Armed Forces did that. Other things he's not responsible for by that argument include writing and passing the Patriot Act, Accomplishing our Mission in Iraq, rebuilding the Pentagon, building the WTC memorial, promoting teen abstinence, and improving the security of our borders.

You're quite right. Bush can't be held responsible for anything that he didn't personally have a day-to-day hand in, or deal with the truly responsible parties directly.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

I more or less agree w/crs that the abuse of the debit cards is minor peculation; people made dumb decisions about how to spend their "free money" because they could, and I can't think of any way it could have been stopped.

Evidence of major peculation on the part of Halliburton et al. is much more important.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

How? You create a culture of integrity.

When you give away sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts and hire based on politics not skills, you create a culture of corruption. A fish rots from the head down.

[nooks.livejournal.com]

You remind me of the days after the 2004 election when various people were looking at exit polls, noticing that large numbers of people said that "moral issues" or something along those lines decided their vote, and deciding that gay marriage and a few related issues were the reason that the Democrats lost. I still believe that a great many Americans were really unhappy about Bill Clinton and continued to vote for Bush for that reason.

When I worked at a public library, the Clinton biography came in, was processed and put on the shelf, and for the most part that's where it stayed. In conservative upstate New York, Clinton's name was still a dirty word. People were pissed, they still are (or at least they were then), and they don't seem to be about to forget.

It's just like the fiscal responsibility spin—Republicans have done a simply awesome job at selling themselves as fiscally and morally superior to the Democrats, and it's going to take more than a billion bucks spent on stuff like this to work past it.