4A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, March 10, 2005 OPINION I Siuiwu&z JASON Z. PESICK Editor in Chief SUHAEL MOMIN SAM SINGER Editorial Page Editors ALISON Go Managing Editor EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com NOTABLE QUOTABLE Courage." - Former CBS Nightly News anchor Dan Rather, signing off at the end of his final broadcast last night. COLIN DALY TI- MiCH lAN IALY -ey -Tol Di-HIM IT WOVLJN-r wMgAK,. 4 0 Masters of the universe ZAC PESKOWITZ THIE LOW\ER 'FRE.QUENCIEwS ast week, the Bush administration floated Carleton Fiorina, the fallen CEO of Hewlett-Packard, as a pos- sible successor to James Wolfensohn as president of the World Bank. If Fio- rina eventually finds her way to the World Bank she will be just one more in the long line of execu- tives, many of them failed and semi-failed, to be tapped for high-ranking government posts. The example par excellence is John Snow, the current treasury secretary, who presided over a troubled period as CEO of the railroad com- pany CSX. During his leadership, CSX con- sistently underperformed competing railroads and its stock repeatedly failed to meet Wall Street analysts' expectations. Thomas White, President Bush's first appointee as secretary of the Army, had a checkered tenure at Enron Energy Services, which experienced enormous trading losses under his guidance. Since first entering the White House four years ago, Bush has consistently promised to bring the best practices of American business to American government. In his 2000 speech accepting his party's nomination for the presi- dency, Bush touted his own business acumen. "I've been where the buck stops in business and in government. I've been a chief executive who sets an agenda, sets big goals, and rallies people to believe and achieve them." Bush has certainly lived up to the promise of populating his White House with former business lead- ers. Even those officials who have spent most of their careers in the public sector have had significant stints in business. In between his years as the youngest secretary of defense in the nation's history and the oldest secretary of defense in the nation's history, Donald Rums- feld had a go as chief of the pharmaceutical producer GD Searle. Vice President Cheney was of course the CEO of Halliburton before joining the Bush ticket in 2000. Performance pay, flatter and less hierar- chical organizations and all the other ideas of the modern manager would revolutionize Washington. Whatever the merits of this strategy, Bush has gone about implement- ing it in the precisely wrong way. As Dan- iel Gross of Slate has argued, the business experience of the majority of the Bush White House consists of refugees from Washington who auctioned off their influence-peddling skills and fat Rolodexes to the highest bidder. Entrepreneurial, risk-taking visionaries are a rare breed in this crowd. Instead of injecting Washington with innovative solutions and a fresh outlook on how government can accom- plish its goals, Bush has recruited political retreads who have transformed their contacts into plush positions. In addition to selecting the wrong type of character to fill his MBA presidency, those positions which are in most need of a hard- charging former executive have surprisingly gone to people who do not match the profile of the ideal. The secretary of Homeland Secu- rity, whose main job responsibility is complet- ing the largest reorganization of government services since the early days of the Cold War, went to federal judge Michael Chertoff after another nonexecutive, former New York City Policy Commissioner Bernard Kerik, with- drew his nomination. Chertoff's most sig- nificant managerial responsibility prior to his current job was leading the Department of Justice's criminal division, an outfit that pales in comparison to the complexity of DHS. Bush has nominated John Negroponte to serve as the first director of National Intelligence, a position that is equally challenging as the DHS post. Negroponte's most pressing task is cre- ating a coherent structure out of the chaos of wiring diagrams that emerged from the intel- ligence reform legislation passed last fall. T he mentor of the disgraced former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay once told his young protege to turn down an offer from then-President George H.W. Bush to serve as his secretary of commerce. According to the Enron tell-all, "The Smartest Guys in the Room," Lay was instructed that there was only one Cabinet-level position with sufficient gravitas for a man of his accomplishment: Treasury secretary. Among the greatest sins of the executive who traffics in connections is the cultivation of arrogance. This is a type of arro- gance that usually frustrates people who must work with sprawling organizations staffed with career bureaucrats, who the typical politi- cal appointee has no real authority over. To the extent that these self-inflated egos can be tolerated, the Bush administration ought to put them where they are actually needed. e Peskowitz can be reached at zpeskowi@umich.edu LETTER TO THE EDITOR Prop. 2, not satirist, threatens gay rights TO THE DAILY: In the Daily, Gary Glenn of the American Family Association of Michigan and Patrick Gillen of the Thomas More Law Center denied that supporters of Proposal 2 engaged in any deception in the lead-up to the Nov. 2 vote (Same-sex EMU policy under fire, 03/08/2005). Glenn said that he was "not familiar with" having made a statement before the election attributed to him by the American Civil Liber- ties Union in which he allegedly stated that the amendment would "not affect benefits offered to people living together or in same-sex rela- tionships." Now that the amendment is law, Glenn believes that Eastern Michigan Univer- sity (and next on the list: the big enchilada, the University of Michigan) should be barred from providing domestic partnership benefits. In dubious support of this goal, Glenn repeated a litany of hysteria-based and factually absurd assertions about the "self-destructive" effects of "homosexual behavior." Whether they acknowledge it or not, the tune of Proposal 2's backers was different before the election. In the Oct. 28, 2004 Daily (Proposal would entrench gay marriage ban), a representative of Citizens for the Protection of Marriage was quoted as saying that Pro- posal 2 "was never an issue that had anything to do with benefits." A spokesman for the Michigan Catholic Conference was quoted in the Daily (Catholic Church openly supports Prop. 2, 10/22/2004) as saying, "The church does not believe that this will take away ben- efits from anybody ... I don't think the word 'benefits' is in the proposal." As someone who may be directly affect- ed by this full-bore assault on domestic partnership benefits, it astounds me that a satirical column by Joel Hoard the Daily (How the homosexuals stole my son's inno- cence, 02/24/2005) is capable of generating more outrage on this supposedly activist campus than the real and present danger to the lives and wellbeing of numerous mem- bers of the campus community posed by a cadre of well-organized, well-funded and largely unopposed fundamentalists. Long after domestic partnership benefits have been trashed statewide and the families of University employees and students are forced to beg, borrow and steal to find med- ical coverage and to get other basic legal protections, the University community will still be scratching its collective head over whether Hoard's column was "vile," "dis- gusting," "offensive" or merely "myopic." Frank Lester Rackham a VIEWPOINT Why Scalia is right a0 BY JOHN STIGLICH Secularists have to be stopped. Last year, they lead a failed assault on the Pledge of Alle- giance, and this year they're going after the Ten Commandments. I believe the Founding Fathers will spin in their graves if the court sides with the American Civil Liberties Union and holds that religious symbols displayed on govern- ment property violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. For far too long, the courts have bought into the revisionist history argument that forms the backbone of secular- ism and disregarded the true influence religion had on America declaring its independence and establishing the current government. Secularists are correct in asserting that Enlightenment theories were important to the construction of the Declaration of Indepen- dence and the Constitution. However, what secularists purposely forget to mention is even Enlightened thinkers theorized the rights of man - the rights government exists to protect - come from God. Most Enlightened theories on government sought to criticize the role of monarchs in government. can lead to serious trouble in divorce court. The law gives parents authority over their children in an effort to command obedience - the Fifth Commandment. Bearing false witness against your neighbor, the Ninth Commandment, in court is a serious crime. According to Locke, we have rights to life, liberty, health and property. These are natu- ral rights; that is, they are rights that we have in a state of nature before the introduction of civil government, and all people have these rights equally. Sound familiar? The Declara- tion of Independence includes a passage where the Founding Fathers assert, "(People) are endowed by their Creator with certain inalien- able rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Simply put, the Founding Fathers and Enlightened thinkers agreed God gave rights to man that government should protect. They also agreed monarchial governments with divine rulers are not legitimate because they cannot protect those rights. This helps explain why the Continental Army rose up in arms against British monarchial rule. This also explains the importance of the Establishment gress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which set guidelines for land expansion and includes the passage, "Religion, morality and knowl- edge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encour- aged." Thomas Jefferson later declared that religion is "deemed in other countries incom- patible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support." Encouraging religion - my God - how could that not violate the First Amendment? I know, let's ask the Supreme Court as soon as it finishes its opening prayer of "God save the United States and this Honorable Court." Or maybe if we can revive Jefferson - author of the famous "separation of church and state" line and a man who secularists claim did not believe in God - and he can tell us stories about how he approved of and attended reli- gious services in the Treasury Building and the Supreme Court. Jefferson could also explain why while he chaired the Washing- ton D.C. school board he wrote an education plan that required reading the Bible and Isaac Watt's Hymnal. Or we can simply look in the 0 x.. a . _V .