RE Bush's appointment of Brown, it was just a matter of time before our media would write
"all administrations do it."Long before Michael D. Brown became the poster boy for the overwhelmed and lightly qualified political appointee in Washington, there was Craig Livingstone, a former barroom bouncer who dreamed of bigger things and found them in the Clinton White House.
You knew it would be Clinton, didn't you.
Livingstone parlayed a stint as an advance man for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign into a White House job as head of personnel security. He relished the clout of handling background checks of White House employees, swaggering around the West Wing in dark glasses and attending film premieres with beautiful women.
The bastard's
swaggering probably led to countless unnecessary deaths, right?
It was all a prologue to a fall. Livingstone quit in June 1996 amid a scandal over the improper requisitioning of more than 400 FBI background reports on employees from previous administrations, most of them Republicans, purportedly in a misguided attempt to clean up the White House access list. Within a few years, he was driving a limousine to make ends meet.
The article goes on to say that most political appointees are relegated to harmless ambassador positions, lays some blame at the feet of the Senate, and finally concludes it's all just politics as usual.
One wonders whether the reporter, Christopher Lee, decided on his own to write this up, or whether the White House suggested this tack.
In the end, Lee cannot find an example of a Clinton political appointee who does worse than use the president's helicopter for a golf outing, but never mind, they're all the same.