Outsourcing the Presidency

Well, it's still early but it seems that the Iraq Study Group was just another waste of time and money. Of the 79 recommendations in the report, Bush has inferred that he doesn't like any of them. Not a one. I find it a little disheartening but not surprising.

"A week after the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gave Bush 79 recommendations for changing direction in the unpopular Iraq war, Bush did not appear to be warming to some of the panel's major conclusions as he prepared his own plan."
From Dec.9th : Richard Perle, a prominent neoconservative and early advocate of invading Iraq, dismissed the panel as a “misadventure” that should be ignored. “You don’t outsource the responsibilities of the commander in chief,” Mr. Perle said. “The whole thing is absurd.”

Outsourcing the Presidency? Well, I suppose one could look at it that way. I've also heard rumors that the panel was a 'come to the rescue' effort initiated by Bush Sr. But now I suppose that the term "outsourcing the presidency" has made it into the Republican talking points, because W. had this to say:

From Paul Krugman's NY Times Op-Ed piece on Dec.11th entitled "Outsourcer in Chief":

"According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he won’t respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group’s report because he doesn’t want to “outsource” the role of commander in chief."

Hmm... sound familiar? Krugman then goes on to say that for an administration that has outsourced everything from a Coast Guard modernization program, to police training in Afghanistan, to FEMA evacuation techniques during Hurricane Katrina, they've all been a dismal failure.

The result of these three mentioned?

The Coast Guard spent $17 billion and Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman gave them "expensive ships that aren’t seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored 'repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe,' while 'the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors."

"In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision: when conducting a recent review, auditors couldn’t even find a copy of DynCorp’s contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still doesn’t have an effective police training program."

FEMA's "job of evacuating people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn’t even know where to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired, Landstar “found us on the Web site.”

Perhaps we can find someone on the internet who can do a better job than the worst president ever. After all, it's not like the next person to have the job can do worse... but, boy, are they going to have a major mess to clean up.