Performance related issues

On a somewhat related topic to the post below, it probably won't come as any shock to learn that those Bush appointees in charge of the Walter Reed Hospital and directly responsible for the mistreatment being ladled onto wounded vets there and across the country have earned themselves some healthy bonuses. Big bonuses.

Months after a politically embarrassing $1 billion shortfall that put veterans' health care in peril, Veterans Affairs officials involved in the foul-up got hefty bonuses ranging up to $33,000.

The list of bonuses to senior career officials at the Veterans Affairs Department in 2006, obtained by The Associated Press, documents a generous package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The VA now sports the most generous bonuses in government, averaging $16K per year. This in an agency for which Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have proposed budget cuts almost every year of his presidency.

When Bush came to office, he was calling himself the CEO president. In Bush's deranged mind, this was supposed to comfort and soothe the American voter and allay concerns about how he would manage or mismanage the country. Of course, this went over well with his have and have-more base. But anyone familiar with Bush's previous performances in the private sector took Bush's "promise" as the warning it actually was. Nonetheless, Bush has performed as promised, mimicking the worst of recent corporate behaviour. He has bankrupted the country, engaged in accounting fraud to cover up the true costs of various programs, and rewarded his various stock holders with untold fortunes at the expense of the environment and the American public. And now, in the worst traditions of failing enterprises and on top of his shameful record of graft, corruption and fraud, his "CEO" administration rewards itself hefty bonuses even in the face of the worst possible failure to the American public: mistreatment of those sent to fight his bloody-minded, illegal war.

The next time someone tells you that they will be a "CEO president," consider yourself warned.