I blame that progressive, George Bush.
Really. I think that the Mineta nomination and retention was one of the stupidest (among many) things that he did.
The problem is, of course, that the alternatives (Gore or Kerry) would have been even worse. And at least he tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie, against the successful opposition of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
MIneta was terrible. Tennant, however, took the cake for incompetent hold-overs. The CIA on his watch missed so many things… 9-11, Weapons of Mass Destruction, etc., etc.
What specifically did he do that makes you say that. He certainly didn’t “rein in” the abuses of the CRA; His White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership in 2002 (see his speech here) led (at least in part) to Angelo Mozilo, and the majority of Countrywide’s garbage ended up on Fannie and Freddie’s books.
I think this quote from that speech speaks volumes:
you don’t have to have a lousy home for first-time home buyers. If you put your mind to it, the first-time home buyer, the low-income home buyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else
I agree, Gore/Kerry would have been an un-mitigated disaster. But I place as much blame for the mortgage meltdown on Bush as anyone else. He enthusiastically endorsed programs that were meant to encourage banks to make loans to people who couldn’t pay them back. In that environment, “Moral Hazard” goes out the window. And he was responsible for creating that environment.
While Tennant may have deserved to lose his job, it’s not for the reasons you cite, Doug. While the CIA missed some of those things, other things were filtered out by upper leadership other than Tennant. For example, the WMD embarrassment is due to interference by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who set up their own intelligence gathering entity to bypass the CIA and other agencies. They may well have done this to knowingly launder bad and fraudulent intelligence. That is part of the reason Rumsfeld is my choice for worst Bush official.
I hate to say this, but there’s something of a history during the Bush Administration of fraudsters telling government officials what they want to hear. Another example is the E-Treppid fraud (they claimed their could decode messages in Islamic new media sent for terrorists) which generated an orange alert in December, 2003 (over Christmas and New Year’s Eve).
We’ll probably never be able to know what these officials were thinking, but Rumsfeld deliberately bypassed the intelligence community and promoted (perhaps knowingly) false and fraudulent information. I don’t remember well his justification for doing so (something about the intelligence community giving him bad information and being inefficient?). If he was sincere, then it backfired tremendously.
What specifically did he do that makes you say that.
This.
Thx for the link Rand. I guess the final sentence says it all:
But isn’t it funny how our watchdog media have missed these two stories?
There is a crying need for the automation of serious news delivery. If you build up business intelligence reports so that all voters can see how much a bill will cost the country and themselves personally and they get automatic reports either by amount trigger (I want to know about expensive bills) or periodically (give me a report every three days), it no longer matters that the talking heads are obsessing about the celebrity death of the day. The public is informed anyway and I suspect the public would become much more involved.