Defining leadership down

In a recent essay I wrote about the terrible moral climate of the Bush era.  But in the days since that essay, written just a few weeks ago, we've seen a torrent of new revelations, resignations and accusations.  They are coming so fast and furious now that they are often not even getting on the front page of major papers.  This age of Bush the raid of a Congressman's home by the FBI has become a regular, everyday occurance. 

Let's do a quick review of what we've learned in the last few weeks: for years dozens of senior Administration officials knowingly violated laws requiring them to keep records of their communications; millions of these emails were "lost;" it has become clear that several senior staffers of Justice perjured themselves in front of Congress earlier this year; the Attorney General himself also appeared to have lied to or purposefully misled Congress; a senior Justice staffer just resigned over ties to Abramoff; more Republican staffers were convicted in the next stages of a variety of scandals; the NYTimes has a devastating story today on how many of the completed reconstruction projects in Iraq are no longer functioning as planned; at least three new Republican Members of Congress have had public action taken against them, including two who have had their homes or offices raided by the FBI; and George Tenet's new book appears to, of course, indicate once again how much the Iraq War was a neocon big lie.

In the age of Bush we've seen just about everything.  Official corruption of every kind and at a scale perhaps not seen in US history; sexual intimidation of minors; prostitutes and limos; the big lie as common strategy; to make it complete we needed a Republican Madam.  As a the Post reports today we now have one, and she is going public on 20/20 on May 4th about her client list, which appears to include a host of conservative big wigs.  A senior Rice deputy was the first to go, earlier this week. 

It is important that we muckracking progressives make the moral climate and leadership failures of this era a major topic in the Presidential campaigns of both parties this year.  It has been a leadership failure of epic scale, and needs to be discussed publically by our Presidential aspirants.