Bush Bypasses Senate on Two Crony Appointments
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0108-02.htm
WASHINGTON - Resorting once more to controversial "recess" appointments,
U.S. President George W. Bush has named two political cronies to key
administration positions without Senate approval.
Ellen Sauerbrey, a former state lawmaker and unsuccessful right-wing
Republican candidate for governor of Maryland, will now move into her
new office as Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees, Population,
and Migration, a job with a billion-dollar budget and major voice in
directing direct emergency relief operations around the world.
Bush also named J. Dorrance Smith, a long-time television producer and
Republican loyalist who helped organize the 2004 Republican National
Convention, as the Pentagon's chief spokesman.
Smith's nomination, which, unlike Sauerbrey's, was approved by the
relevant Senate Committee, was nonetheless held up by Democratic
senators who voiced strong concern about a recent Wall Street Journal
column http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007498
by the nominee in which he accused some U.S. television networks of
aiding terrorism through their ties with al-Jazeera.
Sauerbrey's nomination has been particularly controversial. It was
opposed by three of the nation's most important newspapers,
The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post,
both because of her far-right ideological views and her almost total
lack of relevant experience, particularly in emergency relief operations,
which her office oversees.
In that respect, the timing of her nomination was particularly unfortunate,
coinciding with the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), then headed by another
political appointee with no relevant experience, Michael Brown.
"Once again, this president has bypassed the normal procedures
to put his cronies in office to the detriment of the American people,
and, in this particular case, the people of the world,"
California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, which never even voted on
Sauerbrey's nomination, said Thursday.
Smith, who has been friends with his new boss, Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President ***** Cheney, since they all
worked in the White House under former President Gerald Ford in
the mid-1970s, came under criticism during President Bill Clinton's
second term for scandal-dominated coverage when he served as
director of political coverage for ABC News. He also is known as
an outspoken fan of Fox News, the far-right cable network owned
by Rupert Murdoch.
But critics have been most concerned about the opinions expressed
in last April's Journal column in which he wrote: "Osama bin Laden,
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al Qaeda have a partner in al-Jazeera and,
by extension, most networks in the U.S. This partnership is a
powerful tool for the terrorists in the war in Iraq."
The article, "The Enemy on Our Airwaves", was published shortly
after British Prime Minister Tony Blair reportedly dissuaded Bush
from bombing al-Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar in retaliation
for what the White House saw as its biased and damaging coverage
of the U.S. military assault on Fallujah, although the White House
has denied that such a discussion took place.
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It's so hard to find good help these days.
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