FATS & THE PARANOID STYLE

Today, Fats was a textbook case of the paranoid style in American politics. He was so upset by the Libby verdict that he lashed out at the media, the bureaucracy, the Washington establishment, Joe Wilson & Valerie Plame, Richard Armitage and Colin Powell: they are all liberals conspiring to get Bush and the conservatives!

When Fats mentioned the bureaucracy, I thought of the Nixon administration:

"In its eye the permanent bureaucracy was a wily and aggressive champion of policies and programs the voters had repudiated in the 1968 election. ... the bureaucracy was certainly regarded as an enemy by the Nixon White House..." ¹

This distrust accounts for the tendency of Republican administrations to appoint hacks to high level posts:

"The Reagan White House was constantly putting out fires caused by hacks in bureaucracies like the U.S. Information Agency (run by the husband of Nancy Reagan's best friend, who secretly taped conversations with top officials in hopes of cashing in on a memoir) and the Environmental Protection Agency (a former toxic-waste cleanup official was convicted of lying to Congress about favoring her ex-employer). According to The Washington Post, Reagan's personnel office, which was charged with staffing the federal bureaucracy, was "a study in cronyism," run by a crony of Reagan crony Meese."

We also know that Pres. Fredo likes hacks (Michael Brown) and even nominated one to the Supreme Court (Harriet Miers), so three Republican presidents have appointed hacks because, among other things, they distrust the "liberal" bureaucracy.

Limbaugh complains that there aren't conservatives in the bureaucracy but how can one expect them even to apply for government jobs when GOP leaders constantly disparage it?


¹ page 222 from "Bureaucracy in the American Constitutional Order" by Francis E. Rourke, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 102, No. 2. (Summer, 1987), pp. 217-232.