Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, July 03, 2009 1:44:38 PM
In Washington, conservatives are never really “in power”
As these numbers illustrate, it is the career civil servants who
pull the millions of levers of power, not the few political appointees
at the top of every agency. It is very difficult for the appointees to
even keep track of the policies being implemented by the career staff,
much less change them.
This would not be a problem if the career ranks were really filled with nonpartisan individuals (as the New York Times unwaveringly claims) who impartially carried out the policies of the president.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. From the State
Department, to the Central Intelligence Agency, to the Department of
Justice, and every agency in between, career employees are
overwhelmingly partisan liberals, just like in the media and academic
worlds. As Richard Perle has eloquently said, when George Bush tried to
pull the levers of government, he never realized that they were
disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile.
The bureaucracies of these agencies have their own policies and they
largely ignored President Bush’s directives and his political
appointees, a problem President Obama will not have.