Originally posted by: ScottMac
The FDA is all bureaucrats. They run the same way whether a Republican or Democrat is sitting in the oval office.
And many / most of teh Fortune 500 ARE run by hippies (in their previous life as a student) and most of them seem to be doing pretty well, all-in-all ... that's why they are the top 500.
You're wrong. There is an element of the bureaucrat class going on regardless of party, but there's a large change between the parties, in mission, accountability, partisan appointees.
Bush has appointed something like 200 former industry lobbyists and officials to positions representing the public oversight for those industries - that's not the same as a democrat.
And those appointments matter. We've seen no small number in many agencies of staff loyal to the public interest - not the epithet 'bureaucrat' but honest worker - shut down by the political corruption of the appointed leaders. From the Gail Norton Department of the Interior, to the analyst threatened to hide the real cost of the Medicare drug benefit giveaway from Congress, to many in the state department who resigned, to the punishment of the US Attorneys who were honest instead of willing to do corrupt things, on and on.
FEMA may be the most famous poster child of a 'can-do' democratic president building up an agency, contrasted with a 'put the money elsewhere' tear-down Republican.
As I posted in another thread, imagine if a democratic President tries to do what JFK did in 1961, if we had not put a man on the moon already, and say the government would lead such an effort at a cost of (today's dollars) hundreds of billions of dollars. The righties would scream how bad an idea it was, the government can't do that sort of thing - and yet the democrats got it done - in the 1960's. We've seen both President Bushes commit the nation to a man on Mars, trying to get the same sort of glow as Kennedy - and see the result.
Even Al Gore as VP headed a commission to reduce government waste, and got rid of hundreds of thousands of federal positions - with an emphasis on the military after the cold war ended, but not all by any means. Harry Truman, as a Senator, headed a famous commission into the war profiteering in WWII - something we need today with Iraq, but which the administration opposes.
No, you like many or most righties are basing your views on ideology. Democrats have long hated incompetence in government, waste in government; but people like you are susceptible to the lies of the marketing people for Republicans saying how the dems like big wasteful government, and you can't see how you are falling for it. Kennedy had a drastically smaller government that the ones that followed. Big government growers were Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43. Remember who won WWII? Who actually SOLVED a lot of the big national problems in Elder poverty (social security) and people, especially elders, going without healthcare (Medicare), over the objections of the Republicans, in systems that analysts say would be far more expensive to run in the private sector with the profit motive? Did you ever hear of the VA being an incompetent, scandal-ridden agency until the Bush administration incompetence and budget priorities at the top?
Here's how the typical right-winger votes:
Oh, the Republians say they're against big wasteful government, and I agree with that, so I'll vote against the democrats who must love that stuff.
How they don't vote:
I'm against big wasteful government, so I'll rationally analyze which party has more effective and efficient government, and base my choice on the answer.
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