In the Bush regime you don't have to draw a line between the promoters of wacko ideology and the enablers of mass thievery--it's one big crime family

Our motto: "No student left un-shaken-down"

I haven't had a chance yet to read the Murray Waas piece Howie cites below detailing the nuts 'n' bolts of how partisan scumbags in the White House perverted the operation of the Justice Department into an agency whose primary--if not only--function is to further their political agenda. I really am curious about the details of the process, but for the time being I've got the gist of it from Howie's post.

Meanwhile in this morning's Washington Post I was reading how the recently exposed cesspool of corruption that is the nation's student lending program--now an $85 billion a year business--uncovered by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and others is neither an accident nor a surprise. It turns out that the potential problems were identified by the Clinton Education Department, which drafted proposals that were joyously trashed once the thieving scumbags and thieving-scumbag enablers of the new regime had the chance.

"The proposed policy," writes the Post's Amit R. Paley, "which Education Department officials drafted near the end of the Clinton presidency and circulated at the start of the Bush administration, represented an early, significant but ultimately abortive government response to a problem that this year has grown into a major controversy."

In a pattern we are now seeing documented (with "smoking guns" all over the damned place, if anybody cared) throughout the Bush regime:

The abandonment of the 2001 proposal underscores what some consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers believe is lax federal oversight of the financial aid system by a department they say is too cozy with the industry. More than a dozen senior department officials either previously worked in the student loan business or found high-paying jobs in the sector after they left the agency.

"The Department of Education has been run as a wholly owned subsidiary of the loan industry under this administration," said Barmak Nassirian, a longtime advocate for industry reform at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "They are running the federal loan program for the profit of their friends and not for the benefit of students and taxpayers."

Chad Colby, a department spokesman, said he was not aware of the 2001 proposal but noted that a task force was created last week to consider new rules.

So the wholesale thieving and gouging that has come to infest the student loan business was in fact expressly and knowingly blessed by the apparatchiks of the Bush regime. You'd think they would have their hands full trying to arrange the un-education of America's youth back to the 14th century, but it turns out that no, they have plenty of time to enable the friends and cronies of Bushworld to steal every dollar bill they can get their scummy paws on.

I'm not even sure that "a scandal a day" describes the scale of the corruption now spewing out of the Bush regime. Just from the dribs and drabs that have begun to be documented, it seems clear that the breadth and depth of the dismantling of our democracy and the 24/7 thievery exceed even the wildest imaginings of the most devout Bush-basher.

For "people like us," the Bush regimists have created a gold rush of opportunity, with the "government" acting as a cheerleading section. The victims, of course, are ordinary Americans, for whom the regime apparently has limitless hatred and contempt. To quiet the loathsome masses, known affectionately as "suckuhs," it enslaves them with junk religion and wacko way-far-right ideology.

Remember when George W. Bush made believe he wanted to be president so he could bring an end to the sleaze of the Clinton administration? Is somebody going to try to help Americans understand the scope of the fraud that has been perpetrated on them amid the regime's orgy of flag-waving? The media don't seem much interested, and neither do many Democrats, whose attitude toward government-sponsored profiteering is, "Whee, it's our turn now!"