The Bush Administration, Fractally F***ed Up, Pt. 2

Of course, as a progressive, I'm not really in love with the polices of the Bush Administration. That's merely to be expected. But I think that the least any American can ask is that the Administration at least execute its disagreeable policies and programs with an iota of competence or honesty. And that has been my main beef with this Administration: there seems to be no corner of it that is not completely mismanaged or full of grasping, featherbeading, party hacks.

Take for example, the Reading First program. The administration considers this program to be one of the success stories in the No Child Left Behind policy initiative. It is designed to promote youth reading through scientifically-proven programs. An audit from the Office of the Inspector General -- one of several ongoing audits of the program -- has found subtantial misconduct. From the AP:

The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

...

In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn’t support, according to the report released Friday by the department’s inspector general.

“They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” the Reading First director wrote, according to the report.

That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency.

...

About 1,500 school districts have received $4.8 billion in Reading First grants.

Later, he was to decide that the Bush Administration was fractally fucked up. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and fucked up as the whole thing in its entirety.