Bye-bye, Lurita! Life is unfair. Once upon a time, disgracing yourself and your country the way you did could have earned you a Medal of Freedom

Actually, the Bush-regime rats aren't so much deserting
this sinking ship as shoving one another over the side.

Remember the good old days of the first term of the Bush regime, when there seemed to be no malfeasance a regimist could commit that could get him/her fired? By and large, the more egregious your misdeeds, the likelier you were to find Chimpy the Prez draping a Medal of Freedom around your neck. (Personally, I don't think I would want the world's most maladroit human being getting anywhere close to my neck, especially not when he's wielding an object capable of strangulation. But hey, it was probably better than the shit-canning they deserved.)

Well, those were the old days. Now the steady outflow of regime lackeys being frog-marched out of government service in disgrace is coming to resemble a stampede. The misconduct has become so egregious that instead of the usual image of rats deserting a sinking ship, we've got the rats pushing one another over the side of this leaky tub.

Latest ejectee from this squalid swamp: the unspeakable Lurita Doan, who devoted her time as administrator of the General Services Administration to turning the GSA into just another shameless enclave of the Right-Wing Political (and Money-Siphoning) Machine. Here is the Politico's account:

Lurita Doan Finally Forced Out At GSA

By John Bresnahan

Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, was forced to offer her resignation tonight, according to an e-mail she sent out this evening.

Doan was appointed in late May, 2006, becoming the first woman to serve as GSA Administrator. With 12,000 empioyees and a $20 billion annual budget, GSA has responsibilty for overseeing the thousands of building and properties owned by the federal government.

Doan became the subject of congressional scrutiny last year for allegedly using GSA to help Republican lawmakers win re-election. Doan denied the allegation, but her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was disastrous. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, called on Doan to resign over the allegations, but Doan refused to do so.

Here is the text of the e-mail that Doan sent out earlier this evening announcing her forced resignation:

"Dear Friends and Colleagues at GSA,

Early this evening I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so. It has been a great privilege to serve with all of you and to serve our nation and a great President.

The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline, re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation's ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government.

These accomplishments are made even more enjoyable by the fact that there were lots of people who told us they could never be done.

Best of luck to all of you, it has been a true honor."

As fellow flopperoos Gen. Tommy Franks and Iraq-occupation bungler L. Paul Bremer III look on, former CIA director George Tenet is rewarded for his bumbling by Chimpy the Choker.

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