Domestic Policy

Via Project for the Old American Century, I have discovered some interesting things about Bush's Domestic Policy Adviser, Karl Zinsmeister.

In 2004, Zinsmeister posted to the American Enterprise Institute website an article from the Syracuse New Times about himself. In the process, he also altered a previous statement attributed to him in which he had said that "people in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings." He subsequently admitted that it was "foolish" to do so, but claimed that he did so to correct the record without criticizing the mistakes of a young journalist. This resulted in a heated exchange between White House press secretary Tony Snow and longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

Later in 2006, the New York Sun reported that Zinsmeister may have run afoul of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 while editing The American Enterprise by taking out advertisements that sought "young" applicants. Further, Zinsmeister used a pseudonym – belonging to the long-dead British writer Gilbert K. Chesterton – in some of the ads.

  Wikipedia

With scant experience in government or campaigns, Zinsmeister seemed an unlikely choice for White House domestic policy chief. [Ed: au contraire]

[...]

[Zinsmeister] wrote a piece titled "How America Is Winning a Guerilla War." A year after that, he declared victory. "The War is Over, and We Won," announced a June 2005 piece. "With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over," he wrote. Although there will still be "egregious acts of terror," he said, "contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq."

[...]

Zinsmeister lamented a "forced diversity crusade" that fuels more alienation than it solves and argued that "Americans should jettison affirmative action and all racial preferences."

[...]

For a dozen years until his appointment, Zinsmeister held forth on all manner of issues and personalities as editor in chief of the American Enterprise Institute's magazine. With a sharp pen, he skewered the left, taking special aim at environmentalists, anti-globalists, feminists, contemporary artists, university faculties, Hollywood, Broadway and particularly the media, composed mainly of "left-wing, cynical, wiseguy Ivy League types, with a high prima donna quotient."

[...]

As Zinsmeister sees it, racial profiling by the police makes sense; the military, if anything, treats terrorist suspects too gently; and casual sex has led to wrecked cities, violence and "endless human misery." In a "soft, often amoral, and self-indulgent age," he warned, some children "will be ruined without a whip hand," and he assured that "things generally go better with God."

  WaPo

A new article in The New Republic shows that Zinsmeister was also hostile toward women. A former American Enterprise editor, Karina Rollins, remembers that Zinsmeister constantly attacked the magazine’s art director, Jo Roback-Paul, criticizing her for going to a doctor’s appointment and for taking maternity leave:

But the biggest grievance harbored by the magazine’s staff concerned Zinsmeister himself. “He went to his son’s basketball game, and then he would give Jo [Roback-Pal] a hard time about a doctor’s appointment,” Rollins says. … While Zinsmeister frequently complained about Roback-Pal to other staffers at the magazine — telling [then-business manager Garth] Cadiz that she was “useless” and “never there” — her former colleagues say that she never missed a deadline and that he was “abusive” toward her. When she angered him by taking a four-month maternity leave, Zinsmeister told Cadiz, “I am never going to hire another woman because they just get pregnant and leave.”

  Think Progress

This is our Domestic Policy chief. One scary son-of-a-bitch.

He and Ann Coulter might make a good couple.