In case you missed it over the weekend, the Bush administration’s Nixonian passion for penalizing their enemies has reached almost-comedic levels.
The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week’s meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell Time, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.
The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush’s second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
The White House admits as much: “We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and — call us nutty — it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that,” says White House spokesman Trent Duffy.
OK, Trent, you’re nutty.
Consider the consequences here. Employees of Qualcomm and Nokia, two of the largest telecom firms operating in the U.S., as well as Ibiquity, a digital-radio-technology company in Columbia, Md., were excluded — from a discussion on telecom standards — because of a contribution they made to a Dem political candidate.
As Kevin Drum said, “The paranoid lengths to which the Bushies will go to punish their perceived enemies is simply stunning.” Quite right; I’m afraid I’ve simply run out of adjectives to describe such lunacy.
On the other hand, I guess I shouldn’t complain. At least the White House didn’t exclude these telecom employees because administration officials thought they “might be disruptive.”