Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Ronald Reagan was America's first Teflon president (nothing stuck to him), but George W. Bush is just plain slippery.
When you look at his record up to now, it's hard to imagine Bush ran in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative." If he's compassionate, I'm a Tibetan monk.
He also called himself "a uniter, not a divider." Frankly, I had never heard of the word "uniter" until Bush used it, but I assume he meant "one who unites." Well, America did unite behind Bush after Sept. 11, but he can thank 20 Middle Eastern terrorists for that. Aside from his so-called war on terrorism, he's done nothing but create division in our country.
When he accepted the Republican nomination in Philadelphia, Bush promised "a new beginning." Throughout his presidential campaign, he ran as a Washington outsider, someone who would freshen up the stale air in our nation's capital.
He's done exactly the opposite.
Nearly all his appointments have been retreads from earlier Republican administrations, many dating as far back as Richard Nixon.
Mind you, I have nothing against retreads.
But people like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, to name a few of the more obvious ones, are something less than fresh air.
In fact, it's hard to find a fresh face in Bush's Washington, unless you include Christie Whitman (formerly Christie Todd Whitman), Bush's emasculated chief of the Environment Protection Agency.
What gets me, though (besides the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another), is Bush's penchant for reviving failed leftovers from previous administrations. It's bad enough that he promised new faces and gave us old ones, but did the man have to pick through the trash to find appointments?
That seems to be what he's done.
On the top of the trash heap was one Eugene Scalia, a lawyer who Bush appointed earlier this year as solicitor for the Labor Department. Scalia, though not one of Bush's retreads, does happen to be the son of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice who in 2000 ordered Florida to stop counting votes while Bush was ahead.
One might say Bush is indebted to the Scalia family.
What makes Scalia trashy, in my opinion, is his announced hostility toward rules designed to make the workplace less dangerous. Existing rules, he said, are "quackery" based on "junk science." Now, it's quite possible that Scalia is at least partly right in that, yet he seems to represent a common Republican attitude that anything that costs an employer money is bad, regardless of how many deaths or injuries to workers it prevents.
And Bush, the "compassionate conservative," gave this guy a high-ranking job in the Labor Department?
Bush dug much deeper into the trash pile to rescue John M. Poindexter, a retired U.S. Navy admiral who was Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.
Poindexter is a convicted felon. In fact, he's a five-time loser, in the sense that he was convicted of five felonies, all of which arose from his efforts to hide the truth of the Iran-Contra scandal from Congress. For that he was sentenced to six months in prison.
However, his convictions were reversed on a technicality in 1991, so, legally, he has a clean record. But we all know what he did.
For those of you who've forgotten, in the 1980s, Iran was considered our enemy. However, that didn't stop Poindexter and Oliver North, among others, from cutting a deal with the Iranians: We'd sell them guns if they'd release American hostages. In some circles, selling arms to our enemies would be considered treason, but in the Reagan-Bush administration, the culprits came out looking like heroes.
Most of the profits from the gun sales were given to the so-called contras in Nicaragua, who were fighting a civil war. The kicker there was that Congress had passed a law explicitly denying American funds to the contras. Poindexter and North thought that was a dumb law, so they broke it.
Poindexter is a very bright guy, the head of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy, but his record of lies and deceit would seem to disqualify him from any responsible government position. But not to Bush in his quest for "a new beginning" in America. In January, Poindexter returned to the Pentagon as director of a new agency called the Information Awareness Office.
The Information Awareness Office appears to me to be one of an ever-growing number of shadowy agencies whose function is not quite clear. In this case, the agency has said it will focus on "asymmetric threats," which may be gobbledygook for "terrorist organizations" -- or perhaps it means "dissident American political groups." Who knows?
Another familiar face off the trash heap is Elliott Abrams, who was assistant secretary of state for Latin America under Reagan. This worthy pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanors for lying though his teeth to Congress and was later pardoned by the first George Bush in one of five pardons that effectively killed any further investigation into Iran-Contra. Some cynics think the investigation would have led to Bush himself if allowed to continue.
In a Washington Post column a year ago, Mary McGrory wrote, "Members of Congress remember Abrams' snarling appearances at committee hearings, defending death squads and dictators, denying massacres, lying about illegal U.S. activities in support of Nicaraguan contras. Abrams sneered at his critics for their blindness and naivete, or called them 'vipers.'"
That's a nice summary of the man who last year Bush appointed director of the National Security Agency's Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations division.
As Jack Paar used to say on the Tonight Show, "I kid you not."
And so it goes. There are other unlikely retreads in the "fresh" Bush administration. John Negroponte, whose record as ambassador to Honduras is downright spooky, is now Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, and Cuban-born Otto Reich, who, as head of Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy used tax dollars to induce Americans to support his boss's Central American policies, is now assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.
It's hard to know what Bush is up to. Why would he pick such obviously tarnished people? I believe in rehabilitation, but none of these guys has as yet shown a hint of remorse for thumbing their noses at American law. They're as arrogant and contemptuous as ever.
When you play in the trash pile, you're bound to get a little dirty. Bush has been lucky so far, but I'd bet just about anything that at least one of his trashy appointments is going to soil his administration some day.
At the very least, he's handed the Democrats a solid weapon to use against him in November. How long will Americans continue to trust a president who consistently tells us one thing and then does another?
Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist and iconoclast. E-mail him at harleysorensen@yahoo.com.
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