Weighing Obama

By Libby Spencer

The White House has helpfully issued a two page memo titled Speech Topper on the Bush Record for those in the administration that may be having a little trouble coming up with good things to say about Bush's self-designed fairytale legacy. Meanwhile, the GAO released a 150 page list of Bush engineered horror stories that will be confronting the incoming Obama administration when they take office. [pdf] There is virtually no governmental agency that is not entirely screwed up by incompetency and outright sabotage of the public interests.

Read the whole sordid capsule version at the first link at least, but here's a shorter version:

Department of Homeland Security: Failed leadership. No plan to integrate emergency efforts with other agencies in event of a crisis. Wasting bucketloads of money. Programs under its management, including TSA, FEMA, immigration and the Coast Guard have no effective policies to protect from potential attacks or disasters.

Department of Defense: Just as inefficient as it's ever been, only now with more crony corruption. No effective plan to rebuild troop and mission readiness.

Department of Agriculture: Still passing out big bucks to non-farmers and mishandling "high-consequence biological pathogens" at laboratories carrying out agency-funded work.

Department of Veterans Affairs: Completely failing to meet the needs of veterans.

Environmental Protection Agency: Policy decisions being influenced by industry groups. Total failure in safety enforcement.

Department of Commerce: Census bureau = epic failure. (Sidenote - Lieberman chairs the Senate committee in charge of overseeing this agency.)

Department of Energy: Failed leadership, inept project planning and rife with crony corruption.

Department of Transportation: Epic across the board failure. Wanton spending, failure to solve transportation problems and no Supertrain.

General Services Administration: Poster agency for incompetency. Doesn't repair the properties it owns, owns properties it doesn't need and another hotbed of crony corruption on leasing practices.

Worse yet, this is not even close to a comprehensive list. It only addresses the bare minimum of bad pratices and doesn't touch such issues as the politicalization of the DOJ for instance.

Everybody has to do what they think is best to advance the progressive, or whatever cause, they believe in. But this is why I'm willing to cut Obama some slack. It exhausts me to just think about the sheer weight of what Bush has ruined in the last eight years. I can't imagine being tasked with trying to repair it and unlike our current Thief in Chief, I believe Obama genuinely feels that weight and is trying to lift it. I don't know how exactly to help him, and I'm not advocating giving him a totally free pass, but I'm just not inclined to add to his burden as long as he's making a good faith effort to carry it himself.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)