Matthew Yglesias » The Worst

Jan 16th, 2009 at 1:36 pm

The Worst

The ThinkProgress team has been working steadily all week to compose this list of the 43 most pernicious Bush administration appointees. You should feel free to look it over, ponder the fundamentally arbitrary nature of ordinal lists of this sort, and criticize our decision-making (”how could you put Harriet Miers over Hans van Spakowsky!”) on your blog—pumping up traffic ever-higher.

Comments
37

37 Responses to “The Worst”

Ralph Bremigan Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
It might also be interesting to post a list (short?) of appointees who performed their jobs well…
right Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Sort of amazing Paul O’Neill and John Snow didn’t make the list. Weren’t they Treasury Secretaries back when, you know, the financial crisis could have been foreseen and averted?
J Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I haven’t looked, but Heckuva Job Brownie better be on the list, at or very, very near the top.

I clicked: he’s at #5, which is fair given that I hadn’t really considered the exercise as extending to internal advisors like Karl Rove.
right Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
It might also be interesting to post a list (short?) of appointees who performed their jobs well…

That would be pretty interesting. I’m trying to think of a couple (being generous here):

Petraeus
Gates
Zoellick
Khalilzad
Bernanke
Mueller?
joejoejoe Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Where is Masal Bugduv on that list?
joejoejoe Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
MY – Try and make a list of the 43 best Bush appointments.

I double dog dare you!
Bob Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Speaking as a practicing progressive lawyer, not fully embracing Miers when she was under attack from the right was really stupid.

She was a partner at a big Texas law firm, was a very respected member of the state bar elected to various leadership positions, and rose to that position in a time and place when there were serious obstacles to women. Perhaps she was not the most qualified, but she certainly had the minimum qualifications needed.

Instead of giving her a quick vote, instead we got a younger, smarter, and far more conservative ideologue, Sam Alito.

Alito is not only the worst member of the court for progressives, but the worst in the past five decades together with Rehnquist.

Thomas, Roberts, and Scalia, as bad as they are, at least sometimes adhere to their conservative legal philosophy even when the result is bad politically for big business.

Not Alito, he a pro-big-business corporate hack.

Just as Bush’s cronyism was about to result in a major own-goal for the right (appointment of an older O’Connor center-right justice) Harry Reid and friends dived in to block the shot. The country will pay for the left’s screw up here for probably the next 25 years.
Adam Villani Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
You gotta admit, though, that whoever does Elaine Chao’s hair and makeup is quite skilled.
Dirk Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Elaine Chao should be in the top 20. No reason she should have ever been named Labor secretary. No reason she should have kept the job and been allowed to institute bad policies and slow down enforcement of workplace safety rules.
JohnsonDelegate Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
You’ve got to love how Hans van Spakovsky is the highest ranking person on the list that remaining right-wingers would even attempt to defend.
pseudonymous in nc Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
You’ve got to love how the major objection to van Spakovsky is that he overruled the career employees at DOJ.

No, you stupid fucking hack, the main objection to van Spak was that he was a vote-suppressor in charge of voting rights.
DavidNOON Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Does anybody remember Harvey Pitt?
ed Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Could the 43 worst appointees from any other administration come close to rivaling this one for sheer awfulness? Nixon? Hayes? Harding? No chance. Zero. Nada.

Worst
Administration
Ever.

Ever.
ed Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
The paid Republican chickenhawk shill neglected to bawk about H-Spak’s other issues:

Spakovsky…used every opportunity “to make it difficult for voters — poor, minority and Democratic — to go to the polls.” In 2008, Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration for the FEC, following months of opposition from lawmakers and civil rights groups.

I know, a Republican full embracing the Southern Strategy. Shocker.
CJColucci Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Quite a list, but why is Ari Flesicher ranked so high? Sure, the best thing you could say about him is that he is a carbon-based life form, but, odious as he was, he was only a freakin’ press secretary. Being a lying sack of shit is part of the job if you work for lying sacks of shit. Ari himself just wasn’t consequential enough.
brenton Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Is Cheney really an “appointee”? Not doubting that he’s the worst member of the administration by far, but he was — unlike the others — voted in by the Electoral College.
steve duncan Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Soliciting choices for a Bush “Hall of Shame” is like turning a priest loose in the showers at a YMCA summer camp. Where to start?
ed Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
The anonymous paid Republican chickenhawk shill coward bawks, “that’s a flat out lie.” Puss-boy, parroting Republican talking points doesn’t make them true:

But shortly after his FEC appointment was announced, von Spakovsky suggested that he did not play a big role in policy decisions in the Justice Department’s voting section. “I’m just a career lawyer who works in the front office of civil rights,” he said at the time.
Yesterday, six former voting-section staffers, including two chiefs, joined with the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal think tank at New York University School of Law, to document what they said was von Spakovsky’s efforts at the Justice Department to suppress the vote in low-income and minority communities — which heavily leaned Democratic. The former staffers also went to Capitol Hill to brief the Senate committee’s staff on his record.
The elements of that record that voting rights activists have found most objectionable include von Spakovsky’s decision in 2005 to override the career staff in approving a Georgia law requiring that people present photo identification to vote. Career lawyers thought the provision would discriminate against black voters.
Around the same time, von Spakovsky wrote an anonymous article in a legal journal arguing that every voter should be required to show a photo ID. The Georgia photo ID statute was struck down by a court.
With von Spakovsky’s backing, the Justice Department unsuccessfully sued to purge the voter rolls in Missouri. He also supported a mid-decade redistricting in Texas that a court rejected.
“He has devoted much of his legal career to suppressing minority voting rights, and he should not be rewarded with a six-year appointment to the Federal Election Commission,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a longtime critic of von Spakovsky who once led the Justice Department’s voting section and now serves as executive director of the Campaign Legal Center. “I think that Hans von Spakovsky’s record demonstrates that he will use his office to elevate partisan concerns among legitimate law enforcement concerns.”

And that guy worked in the Office of Civil Rights. Wow. Just wow. We can’t get a relatively reality-based, non-Republican shithead administration in too soon.
24AheadDotCom Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I’m sure I’d probably agree with some of them, albeit for different reasons.

Meanwhile, I’m eagerly awaiting MattY rushing down the hall to get a correction from the CAP Senior Fellow – and BHO appointee – that I caught in a lie just recently. At first that might seem minor, until you realize that it involves millions and millions of people and it indicates her inability to be intellectually honest.
Kolohe Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Paulson is way too high, considering Geithner has also sat in on most of the meetings of the ‘plunge protection team’. The seeds of destruction were planted well before he took over in summer ‘06. Also, would it really have been a good idea for the Treasury Secretary to say the financial system is not safe and sound? (also, as the quotes in the linked-thru article say, for the most part he was talking about the *banking system* and specifically, the undeniably true fact that individual depositors had nothing to worry about)
ed Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Shorter anonymous pussy chickenhawk paid troll: So what if van Spakovsky is an unethical racist shithead in the finest Lee Atwater tradition, I’m going to pretend on ruling vindicates him for everything. And show your work, coward.
duBois Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Dred Scott! Al hopes we don’t notice that his defense is irrelevant to the charge.
joe from Lowell Says:
January 17th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I don’t see how Tommy Franks makes that list, but Richard Myers doesn’t.

Richard Myers is the Wilhelm Keitel of our era. Yes, sir, you’re right, sir, absolutely, sire, did you lose some weight, sir?
levitra Says:
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 am
levitraGreat site. Good info
xanax Says:
March 14th, 2009 at 9:08 am
I want to say – thank you for this!
xanax
tramadol Says:
March 17th, 2009 at 3:20 am
Great site. Good info
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tramadol Says:
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:15 am
tramadol
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right

Matt Yglesias

The Worst

37 Responses to “The Worst”

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