This news snuck by on Halloween, and it's a real nightmare. The Giuliani presidential campaign has hired Joe Allbaugh as its senior adviser on "general strategy and homeland security."
Joe Allbaugh? The guy who was Governor George Bush's chief of staff in Texas? The guy who Bush put in charge of FEMA, with zero experience, after becoming President? The guy who hired his pal "Heck of a job, Brownie" as #2 at FEMA and then saw to it that Brownie succeeded him when Joe left in 2003 to get rich on Iraq, leaving Brownie in charge when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast?
Yes, that Joe Allbaugh.
Rudy's got some track record when it comes to homeland security. He talked Bush into naming his own henchman Bernie Kerik as the first chief of the Homeland Security department when it was created, but that nomination went down in flames amid charges that Bernie was nothing more than a sleaze and a crook. Way to pick 'em, Rudy.
Back to Joe Allbaugh. In addition to his disastrous tenure at FEMA, he and Dan Bartlett (another Bush lackey) were knee deep in Bush's infamous National Guard records saga back in 1997. This was the year before the Governor's '98 reelection, a time when he was quietly "cleaning house" in anticipation of his not-yet-announced run for the BIG house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
Allbaugh helped fish through the old files stored at Camp Mabry in Austin, and Bush confidante Karen Hughes would later claim -- get this -- that Bush merely wanted to refresh fond memories of his Guard days for the book she was writing for him, "A Charge To Keep." It now seems clear that the purpose was to purge the files of any evidence documenting Bush's military malfeasance and, as the Boston Globe and others reported, subsequent AWOL Guard year in the early 1970s.
Some people have a "lost weekend." It appears W had a lost year that needed scrubbing.
The future president had been a first class flake back in the day, and the photo-op of him prancing around in a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier after 9/11 was meant to alter that historical truth.
Indeed, even though the infamous Dan Rather memos were never fully verified as originals, the 86-year old retired secretary of Bush's commanding officer (the man who wrote those memos) firmly told Rather -- on camera -- that all of the damaging information written in them was absolutely accurate because she was the one who'd typed them for him back then. Ouch.
But again, back to Joe Allbaugh. After he left public service (term used loosely) and was replaced at FEMA by his deputy Michael Brown, Joe set up a company based on nothing more than his relationship with Bush. His outfit facilitated business in Iraq for contractors who wanted to get their hands on all that money the Congress keeps funding with taxpayer dollars, now more than half a trillion.
The man who labored to cover Bush's rear end (Karl Rove handled the brain), who later brought us the Katrina-era FEMA and Brownie, and who then became a war profiteer, is now the Giuliani senior adviser on protecting America.
Take a picture of that, will ya?