Today, the Master himself, the Honorable Economist Paul Krugman also explores the question most on people's minds: How many more incompetent political wonks have the Bushies put in power.
He has an idea where to look.
A tipster urged me to look for Brownies among regional administrators for the General Services Administration, which oversees federal property and leases.
--snip--
Some of the regional administrators at G.S.A. are longtime professionals. But the regional administrator for the Northeast and Caribbean region, which includes New York, has no obvious qualifications other than being the daughter of the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State. The regional administrator for the Southwest, appointed in 2002 after a failed bid for his father's Congressional seat, is Scott Armey, the son of Dick Armey, the former House majority leader.
You get the idea. Go ahead, see what - or rather who - you can come up with. .
Go on. Enjoy. If you thought the FDA and the EPA were ineffectual incestuous crony cocoons, you have some surprises coming. Nearly all the political positions that the president can fulfill are filled by idiots who's only claim to fame is that they think Bush is actually a good president.
Jack Abramoff is a lobbyist who was paid huge sums by clients such as casino-owning Indian tribes and sweatshop operators on Saipan. Two Degrees of Jack Abramoff is inspired by the remarkable centrality of Mr. Abramoff, who was indicted last month on charges of fraud, in Washington's power structure.
The goal isn't to find important political players who were chummy with Mr. Abramoff - that's too easy. Instead, you have to find people linked by employment. One degree of Jack Abramoff is someone who actually worked for the lobbyist. Two degrees is a powerful Washington figure who hired someone who formerly worked for Mr. Abramoff, or who had one of his own former employees go to work for Mr. Abramoff.
Grover Norquist, the powerful antitax lobbyist, is a one-degree man. Mr. Norquist was Mr. Abramoff's campaign manager when he ran for chairman of the College Republican National Committee, then became his executive director. And don't dismiss this as kid stuff: as Franklin Foer explains in The New Republic, the college Republican organization pays serious salaries and has been a steppingstone for the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.
Mr. Rove, by the way, is a two-degree man. He hired Susan Ralston, Mr. Abramoff's personal assistant, as his own personal assistant. For those unfamiliar with what that means, Ms. Ralston became Mr. Rove's gatekeeper - the person who determined who got to see the great man.
Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is also a two-degree man. Tony Rudy, who worked for Mr. DeLay in several capacities, left to work for Mr. Abramoff.
Finally, somebody should be considered a two-degree man on account of the recently arrested Mr. Safavian, who worked for both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist, then went first to the G.S.A. and on to the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he oversaw procurement policy. But I'm not sure who gets credit for hiring Mr. Safavian.
O.K., enough joking. The point of my games - which are actually research programs for enterprising journalists - is that all the scandals now surfacing are linked. Something is rotten in the state of the U.S. government. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that a culture of cronyism and corruption can have lethal consequences.
It's sad how little Americans know about their own history, their own government of the protections the Constitution guarantees for them. It's sad how much we have lost in the last thirty years as our schools have deteriorated. We're like the inhabitants of Planet of the Apes, or the protagonists in Walter M. Miller's A Canticle For Leibowitz where we find ancient technology and lack the know how to use it. One day we will learn the laws of our land all again, we will rediscover the treasures in our Constitution and value them-when we see enough of the opposite manifested in our national policy, the pendulum will swing.
I cannot wait.