When Cronyism Kills

As I was watching Asshole of the Year Award nominee Michael Brown give his "my biggest mistake was not realizing that other people are even more incompetent than I am" defense in front of Congress today, it started to hit me that we are in big trouble if there are more people like him out there holding important posts in BushCo's Federal Government.

Cronyism, of course, has been going on a long time and will continue until the end of the universe. And I don't really care if Bush appoints some of his campaign people to minor positions like deputy assistant to the undersecretary of whatever-the-frack. I don't like it, but it is a political fact of life.

But I have a real problem with people as incompetent as Michael Brown being appointed to important positions, and wonder along with everybody else just how many similar appointments are waiting for the perfect moment to explode in our faces.

TIME Magazine has a piece out on this very issue, and it is aptly titled "How Many More Mike Browns Are Out There?" I found this section about the FDA's new deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs to be particularly troubling:

Nowhere in the federal bureaucracy is it more important to insulate government experts from the influences of politics and special interests than at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency charged with assuring the safety of everything from new vaccines and dietary supplements to animal feed and hair dye. That is why many within the department, as well as in the broader scientific community, were startled when, in July, Scott Gottlieb was named deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs, one of three deputies in the agency's second-ranked post at FDA.

His official FDA biography notes that Gottlieb, 33, who got his medical degree at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, did a previous stint providing policy advice at the agency, as well as at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. What the bio omits is that his most recent job was as editor of a popular Wall Street newsletter, the Forbes/Gottlieb Medical Technology Investor, in which he offered such tips as "Three Biotech Stocks to Buy Now." In declaring Gottlieb a "noted authority" who had written more than 300 policy and medical articles, the biography neglects the fact that many of those articles criticized the FDA for being too slow to approve new drugs and too quick to issue warning letters when it suspects ones already on the market might be unsafe.

FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, who resigned suddenly and without explanation last Friday, wrote in response to e-mailed questions that Gottlieb is "talented and smart, and I am delighted to have been able to recruit him back to the agency to help me fulfill our public-health goals." But others, including Jimmy Carter--era FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy, a former Stanford University president and now executive editor-in-chief of the journal Science, say Gottlieb breaks the mold of appointees at that level who are generally career FDA scientists or experts well known in their field. "The appointment comes out of nowhere. I've never seen anything like that," says Kennedy.

Of course, I expect BushCo to pull crap like this. After all, the neo-fascists who form the heart of the current administration aren't necessarily going to appoint competent people to important posts -- they are going to appoint people who will assist them in implementing their right-winged theocratic extremist agenda.

I guess all we can really hope for is that Congress doesn't rubber stamp these people when the ball is in its court and that the press does its job in exposing these dangerous nominees. The TIME article is a good start down that road, but once you read through the article in its entirety, you'll realize that there is still a lot of work to be done.