Bury Me Broken

Protecting Your Bottom Line (also known as CYA)

When Democrats claim that Republicans are playing politics, oftentimes they are wrong in that they have misnomered or mischaracterized what is occurring. Oftentimes, it isn’t playing politics, it is simply protecting the bottom line by any means necessary. Their bottom line is anything that makes them look bad, anything that refutes what it is that they have definitively declared and their major blocs or constituency. For example in the Knight Ridder Newspapers article, Bush Administration Eliminating 19-year-old International Terrorism Report :

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Rep. Henry Waxman response was “that the Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report.” This isn’t politics. This is the administration covering up, not looking bad by strong arming the National Counterterrorism Center. Pres. Bush is supposed to be strong on the ‘war on terror’ and yet it has to cancel a report that sheds light on how ineffectual this ‘war on terror’ is.

[In the future, I will continue to catalog actions where the Bush administration changes the rules, suppresses information or misrepresents the facts in order to mask their ineffectiveness or inefficiency.

posted by niteskolar @ 11:02 PM