http://www.usnews.com/blogs/mashek/2008/4/21/bushs-lone-star-cronies.html
With only nine months remaining until George W. Bush returns to Texas,
let's examine some of the associates who made the journey with him
during these eight long years. It is not a pretty roll call.
.. Dick Cheney is a Wyoming transplant who started making his millions
when he moved to Houston to head Halliburton. The vice president's
former company has made big bucks as a contractor in Iraq, and
Cheney has become a strange and unpopular figure with his
dissembling on the war.
.. Alberto Gonzales came to the capital as Bush's legal adviser before
becoming attorney general. Members of both parties were not amused
at his convenient memory loss while testifying before Congress. He
can't seem to land a job now.
.. Karl Rove, Bush's political guru, was investigated in the Valerie Plame
scandal but escaped indictment. His scorched-earth conduct of political
campaigns is a bad mark on our system.
.. Harriet Miers was a Texas lawyer who admired the president and became
his White House counsel. Bush's ill-advised nomination of her to the
Supreme
Court was attacked in both parties, and she fled the city.
.. Alphonso Jackson made a quick exit recently from Wa****ngton under
a cloud during his short tenure as secretary of HUD. Jackson seemed
to favor friends in contracts awarded by the agency. He loved perks and
re****tedly spent $100,000 to renovate the kitchen in his office at HUD,
against the advice of some associates.
.. Karen Hughes was Bush's alter ego in Austin and then the White House
before later moving to the State Department as a roving goodwill
ambassador.
It was a tough sell in countries that loathed the president-and handing
out soccer balls didn't do the job.
.. Scott McClellan was Bush's press secretary but looked like a deer in
the
headlights when he tried to explain the president's statements or
policies.
He wrote a book.
.. Dan Bartlett worked in Texas for then Governor Bush before coming to
Wa****ngton as communications adviser. He liked to take issue with any
criticism of his boss, which was perhaps a study in loyalty but was also
comical at times.
.. Rod Paige was Bush's first secretary of education, who found Wa****ngton
was not like the school district in Houston. He left without fanfare. His
successor, Texan Margaret Spellings, at least tried to make No Child Left
Behind work, but the administration didn't sufficiently fund the program.
As for the president himself, he is not a Texan by birth despite the
cowboy
boots. He was raised a Connecticut, white-shoe Yankee. And he's going
back to his adopted home to write a book. If it is his memoirs, it should
be
a doozy.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/mashek/2008/4/21/bushs-lone-star-cronies.html
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