As if we didn't know

According to Tuesday's New York Times, the Congressional Research Service is accusing the Bush administration of having violated federal law when it ordered Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, to withhold information from Congress during the debate on Medicare deform.

Foster would have told Congress that the White House's gift to the insurance industry would cost tens of billions of dollars more than the White House claimed. Thomas Scully, who was then the administrator of Medicare, has admitted he told Foster to keep quiet.

That, the CRS says,

"would appear to violate a specific and express prohibition of federal law." The actuary, it said, has a duty to "make professional and reliable cost estimates, unfettered by any particular partisan agenda."

The White House gave bland assurance that the matter was being investigated, but William Pierce, speaking for the Department of Health and Human Services, said "we are looking to the future, not the past."

In other words, don't count on anything because they're too busy figuring out their next scam.

It really is becoming difficult for me to express the level of contempt I have developed for these people. They have no regard for the public, the world, for principles, honor, honesty, decency. They are not only self-centered, hypocritical, lying, zealous fanatics, they are casual self-centered, hypocritical, lying, zealous fanatics. It's just ordinary to them, there's not even a sense of passion about it. It's just the normal way of doing business. Hannah Arendt's banality of evil for the 21st century.

There's an old line about the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath being that a psychopath doesn't know the difference between right and wrong and a sociopath knows the difference but just doesn't care. Logically, then, a psychopath wouldn't try to cover up their cruelties because they wouldn't recognize them as such. Which seems to indicate that "sociopaths" is the correct description of the Bush cabal. And so it will be.

Footnote: In March, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson promised to make Foster's cost estimates available to Congress. In April, it wrote Congress refusing to do so. Which means, by CRS's account, the White House is still deliberately and consciously violating federal law to advance it's own political agenda. Sociopaths.