The Illustrated Guide to GOP Scandals

May 14, 2007 4:16 AM

The Illustrated Guide to GOP Scandals
posted by trinarian (44 comments total)

who woulda thunk there was a 200 character max input on tags?
posted by trinarian at 4:18 AM on May 14, 2007

Tangled Web 2.0
posted by pruner at 4:36 AM on May 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

And another scandal is that there is only ONE black face and NO female faces amongst those GOP scumbags.
posted by three blind mice at 4:37 AM on May 14, 2007

I can't believe they forgot the republican overlord who is ultimately responsible for each and every scandal: Bill Clinton.
posted by srboisvert at 4:39 AM on May 14, 2007

1. They didn't do it.

2. Look!! A Terrorist!!!

3. The liberal media made it up.

4. Look!! A Terrorist!!

5. Edwards got a haircut!!!

6. Look! A Terrorist!!!

7. Clinton did it first!!

8. Look! A Terrorist!!

9. Even if they did do it, it was perfectly legal.

10. Democrats are corrupt too!! One kept money in a freezer!!!
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 4:55 AM on May 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

pruner: for your convenience I present a text-only page. I too agree that a quickly loading, interconnected, linked out, flashy interactive interface is the sux and I want Geocities back. And where did image maps go? What's with all this linking and tagging? Netscape 4 life! Idiots, all. Code with notepad, it's what my daddy used to say. Code with notepad.
posted by trinarian at 4:59 AM on May 14, 2007

The Wikipedia article also does a good job of making this point.
posted by jiiota at 5:09 AM on May 14, 2007

Pogo, you forgot "Well, if abortion wasn't legal then God would still be protecting us from terrorists..."
posted by chuckdarwin at 5:12 AM on May 14, 2007

And for each of these someone has said, "Surely this ..."
posted by octothorpe at 6:05 AM on May 14, 2007

Code with notepad- too true trinarian, One undo action, they soon learn not to make mistakes
posted by mattoxic at 6:38 AM on May 14, 2007

unfair

Having a category dedicated to the controversies of one president is inherently a violation of NPOV because it makes one person seem worse by Bush being the only president that is "so bad he deserves to have a category page like this just for him." Unless the category is expanded to include controversies of all presidents, which is more encyclopedic since it gives more information or controversy pages from all other 41 presidents are made, it should be deleted. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Crd721 (talk • contribs) 00:23, 30 April 2007 (UTC).

i agree with this statement. Where are similar controversies, be they from George Washingon, Abraham Lincoln, LBJ or Bill Clinton.

Why don't you do the research and post it?
Further, what happens when you do have a president whose administration is "so bad" they deserve to have a category page just like this for it? I see no problem with this page, in fact it was just what I was looking for. DelPlaya 05:13, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
Whether GWB is so bad he deserves it or not is irrelevant, its not the role of an encyclopedia to propose whether a president is the worst president ever, the best president ever, in the middle or any other ranking.
Crd721

Against the proposal to delete Category:George W. Bush administration controversies The complaint is best rectifited through the creation of articles about controversies for the prior 42 presidents, which any United States history text will amply demonstrate have been in profusion, and then creating categories for those articles, not by deleting the catagory in question. President Clinton is a dandy next subjec and focus. It just happens that editors are starting from the (easy to research) present and working backwards from there. There has to be a start somewhere: for this topic, it is G.W.B.. -- Yellowdesk 04:56, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_talk:George_W._Bush_administration_controversies" (emphasis mine)

Yeah, that's gotta be it. It's just easier to research the current president. God I love Wikipedia.
posted by dreamsign at 6:40 AM on May 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

love the tag list, btw.
posted by dreamsign at 6:41 AM on May 14, 2007

dreamsign: I'll take your point that every administration in my lifetime, and likely lifetimes before me too, has wound up with a litany of scandals surrounding it that's almost directly proportional to the time in office and the amount of power possessed.

That said, there are pretty significant differences in the types of scandals involved. We've moved from unapproved fellatio to a war with tens of thousands dead sold on clearly false premises. Shady real-estate deals in Arkansas to the Vice-President's former company being our one-stop shop for shady no-bid contracts. Some shady pardons to secret prisons and a denial of the IV, V, and VI amendments.

I think an unfortunate side-effect of the Clinton impeachment is that the American public just can't take scandal seriously that's no direct bribery anymore. We impeached a guy for covering up a blowjob. No more. We pulled that ace this century.
posted by trinarian at 7:03 AM on May 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Its too bad Mark Lombardi (1951 – 2000) isn't around to document all this. He made amazing drawings out of just this kind of corruption. (Previously on MeFi: Visual Poetry Out of Dirty Secrets.
posted by RMD at 7:10 AM on May 14, 2007 [6 favorites]

Dude, not my point. I'll fess up to loving Wikipedia, but that was still meant in sarcasm.

Cause if there's anything that might even lead to an opinion on Wiki, it's not NPOV.
posted by dreamsign at 7:41 AM on May 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Where's Ollie North, Bill Casey, Ronnie, Ed Meese, Bush the Elder, etc.?
posted by pax digita at 7:59 AM on May 14, 2007

Wow, it's like eWorld, but with the tags divorced from the presentation! The use of cutesy iconography is bad enough (The FDA is has a sandwich for a roof? Ugh) but its also wildly inconsistent. Some buildings look like their real-life counterparts, but the World Bank is a ... safe with a globe atop it; that's inexcusably ham-fisted

Why does the the Dept of Education have it's seal over it while other institutions do not? Couldn't the designers have added added text captions to the image rollovers to let us know who or what we are looking at? Why do the tags at the bottom have to be so explicitly walled off from the illustration? It's difficult to discern the relationships between the art and the text.

I could go on. And on. This is one of the most amateurish, dated looking, user-hostile presentations I've seen in a long time. Squandered opportunities like this frustrate the hell out of me. This could have been great; instead we get devil horns on the tag roll-overs, which tells me nothing, except that the creative director has an axe to grind. What an embarrassment for Slate.
posted by Scoo at 8:00 AM on May 14, 2007

And another scandal is that there is only ONE black face and NO female faces amongst those GOP scumbags.

That's because it's not a complete map. Monica Goodling, Rachel Palouse, Alberto Gonzolase is a minority, Condi Rice is black and a woman (although she hasn't gotten her hands too dirty, so far). Also claude allen is black and Susan B. Ralston (a woman, and Hispanic or asian or something) is the link between Rove and Abramoff.
posted by delmoi at 8:05 AM on May 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

They're missing GOP Rep McHenry's actual voter fraud and outing
posted by amberglow at 8:09 AM on May 14, 2007

Also, HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson (a minority) admitted that he didn't do bussness with democrats, which would have been illegal. No one could turn up any actual cases of him doing it, though.

So yeah, plenty of minorities and women involved in the GOP corruption fest.

Cause if there's anything that might even lead to an opinion on Wiki, it's not NPOV.

That's absurd. The text of the article should be NPOV, but attempting to be totally neutral in what articles are written makes no sense.
posted by delmoi at 8:15 AM on May 14, 2007

this is pretty outstanding. it's one thing to hear about his shit every day for 6 years, and another entirely to see it all sitting there in front of you at once this way.

(also, i think pruner's comment wasn't about the web page itself, but more a play on words combining the GOPs tangled web of deceit and the phrase Web 2.0 since the page has tags and css. I thought it was clever.)
posted by shmegegge at 8:31 AM on May 14, 2007

They also missed Diebold/voter suppression in Florida and Ohio.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:34 AM on May 14, 2007

I mis-read the title as "An Illustrated Guide to GOP Sandals". I was rather disappointed.
posted by dripdripdrop at 8:34 AM on May 14, 2007

That's absurd. The text of the article should be NPOV, but attempting to be totally neutral in what articles are written makes no sense.

*insert comment about reality and liberal bias*
posted by dreamsign at 8:41 AM on May 14, 2007

Is there any part of the current administration that hasn't been exposed as corrupt and inept? Seeing things like this make me wonder what the Agriculture and Transportation secretaries are up to. Somethin' evil, I bet.
posted by klangklangston at 8:42 AM on May 14, 2007

Simpletons out for a quick larf will get it every time. Witty is as witty does. Slate does not.

Every generation has had its Teapot Dome and, going further back, other Presidents have had their scandals. But you gotta admit that as with Grant, many other presidents have had tenures during not-so-happy times.

I think a key difference between them and Bush is that many had prestigious careers before their terms.
posted by valentinepig at 8:49 AM on May 14, 2007

Sorry, but it really sucks to see a set of issues as complex, chilling and historically unprecedented as the creation of a network of secret detention facilities, the imprisonment and torture of thousands of "enemy combatants" (many of whom may actually just be Pakistani political dissidents) without even a modicum of due process all basically reduced to a scandal concerning "Bored soldiers with cameras."
posted by saulgoodman at 8:51 AM on May 14, 2007

Is there any part of the current administration that hasn't been exposed as corrupt and inept?

Frank Rich: ... By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record. ...When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it. ...
posted by amberglow at 8:59 AM on May 14, 2007

Seeing things like this make me wonder what the Agriculture and Transportation secretaries are up to.

Mike Johanns, the Secretary of Agriculture, washes his own toilet and runs his own errands. Mary Peters, the Secretary of Transportation, just started in September.

Condi Rice is black and a woman (although she hasn't gotten her hands too dirty, so far

Well, except for Chevron's oil-for-food program kickbacks to Iraq when she was on Chevron's board and in charge of the committee that oversaw the program.

I just did a Google search for "condoleeza rice corruption" and it said "Did you mean: condoleeza rice cooperation."
posted by kirkaracha at 9:15 AM on May 14, 2007

Restoring honor and integrity to the White House and Washington, DC, the GOP. [cough]

They now pay for the blowjobs!
With your tax dollars!
posted by nofundy at 9:18 AM on May 14, 2007

This is how they operate "normally" nowadays: Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better bombs. The State Department has even taken the unusual step of enlisting the CIA to dispute the validity of Brinkley's work.

His transgression? To begin reopening dozens of government-owned factories in Iraq.

Brinkley and his colleagues at the Pentagon believe that rehabilitating shuttered, state-run enterprises could reduce violence by employing tens of thousands of Iraqis. Officials at State counter that the initiative is antithetical to free-market reforms the United States should promote in Iraq. ...
posted by amberglow at 9:37 AM on May 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

These are missing too: Giuliani's firms and their involvement in govt. scandals/crimes (scooter company fraud and DHS, prisons and DeLay, Saudi Arabia, and more)
posted by amberglow at 10:18 AM on May 14, 2007

Every generation has had its Teapot Dome and, going further back

Come on, Teapot Dome doesn't compare to this, This government drops teapot dome level scandals every week. Even Watergate doesn't compare.
posted by delmoi at 11:51 AM on May 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

i think delmoi's got it. in fact, it's almost like it's part of the admin's stategy--something along the lines of, "hey, let's commit so many bald-faced crimes a person would have to be insane to believe we were capable of doing all these things! then it'll be easy to marginalize our critics, since they'll come across as such hysterical alarmists."

come to think of it, that might not be such a bad strategy...
posted by saulgoodman at 12:07 PM on May 14, 2007

It works like a charm with the media even today -- Lehrer: "You don't assume the president of the US is lying"
posted by amberglow at 12:30 PM on May 14, 2007

Lessons From the Fall
posted by amberglow at 1:15 PM on May 14, 2007

thanks amberglow -- mp3(nyud:8080)
posted by acro at 1:40 PM on May 14, 2007

cool, acro.

This should be there too--The Fort Dix 6--total crock.--... The “someone” he’d been approached by was one of the two paid informants who

…railed against the United States, helped scout out military installations for attack, offered to introduce his comrades to an arms dealer and gave them a list of weapons he could procure, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

That’s right, one of the alleged “terrorists” was so alarmed by what the FBI’s undercover man was saying that he called the cops. ...
posted by amberglow at 2:18 PM on May 14, 2007

McNulty just resigned at DOJ--he was the #2 there
posted by amberglow at 2:49 PM on May 14, 2007

Investigative Journalist Greg Palast Reports on the Firing of New Mexico Attorney David Iglesias
posted by homunculus at 3:34 PM on May 14, 2007

Every generation has had its Teapot Dome and, going further back, other Presidents have had their scandals. But you gotta admit that as with Grant, many other presidents have had tenures during not-so-happy times.

[aghast]

The thing you omit is that Bush made his own unhappy time. Really, what has gone wrong during his administration that he didn't cause? 9-11, that's one, and it's been five-and-a-half years now. Even Katrina was a disaster largely of the administrations' making. If the administration had handled it well it could have been a public relations coup.

That the administration didn't implode years ago, in fact -got reelected-, has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt:
1. That no matter how bad a job a president does, ingrained bias and ignorance can still provide him with a substantial base.
2. That the age of old-school political corruption, in which men attempt to subvert the system on an epic scale, throwing to the winds all morality and pretense of doing good except in the shallowest possible way, never ended. If anything, it has reached its apex.
posted by JHarris at 3:43 PM on May 14, 2007

PBS "Spying on the Home Front" (Tuesday @ 9 pm.)

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.
posted by acro at 7:47 PM on May 14, 2007

So funny and depressing at the same time.
posted by Rain Man at 12:41 AM on May 15, 2007

Lanny Davis gone too--... At the same time, Davis, a former Clinton White House official who had been named by President Bush to serve on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board... In recent months, Davis has had numerous clashes with fellow board members and White House officials over what he saw as administration attempts to control the panel’s agenda and edit its public statements, ... was refusing to investigate issues such as the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere around the world.
Davis’s frustration reached a peak last month when White House lawyers engaged in what he described in his letter as “substantial” edits of the board’s annual report to Congress. Davis charged that the White House sought to remove an extensive discussion of recent findings by the Justice Department’s inspector general of FBI abuses in the uses of so-called “national security letters” to obtain personal data on U.S. citizens without a court order. He also charged that the White House counsel’s office wanted to strike language stating that the panel planned to investigate complaints from civil liberties groups that the Justice Department had improperly used a “material witness statute” to lock up terror suspects for lengthy periods of time without charging them with any crimes. ...
posted by amberglow at 5:19 AM on May 15, 2007