Bill Berkowitz
December 18, 2005

Bush Administration mining fundamentalist recruits

The former Dean of Academic Affairs at the fundamentalist Christian Patrick Henry College is appointed to oversee USAID's democracy and governance programs

Paul Bonicelli, who most recently was the dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College, a small fundamentalist Christian college located Hiring by the Book in rural Virginia, has moved on to oversee USAID's democracy and governance programs. Given his apparent lack of experience in these areas, it appears that Bonicelli could be another Michael Brown-like appointment. Brown, called "Brownie" by President Bush before the administration rather unceremoniously dumped him, was the head of FEMA during the run-up to, and the aftermath of, Hurricane Katrina.

For sheer shock value, it is difficult to top recent headlines about the Pentagon paying Iraqi news outlets to print the "good news" about the U.S. occupation, or Bush threatening to bomb Al-Jazeera. Yet a recent headline, "Ex-FEMA chief to sell disaster advice," soared to the top of the charts of astonishing developments.

The "Ex-FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) chief" in question is Michael Brown. The headline could just as well have been referring to Joe Allbaugh, Bush's first head of FEMA who brought Brown to the agency. Since leaving FEMA -- after working to downsize and de-emphasize the agency -- Allbaugh has been all about gathering up as many contracts as possible for companies represented by his consulting firm -- the Allbaugh Co. Co-founded with his wife Diane, the Allbaugh Co. firm specializes in advising companies how to get in on lucrative disaster relief projects. And, that is what it has been doing in occupied Iraq, and more recently in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans.

Despite the fact that Brown's name has become synonymous with incompetence, failure and calculated indifference, the man insists that he has learned his lessons and has something to offer communities that might have to deal with emergency planning for disasters. "You have to do it with candor. To do it otherwise gives you no credibility," Brown recently told the Rocky Mountain News. "I think people are curious: 'My gosh, what was it like? The media just really beat you up. You made mistakes. I don't want to be in that situation. How do I avoid that?'"

Incidentally, Brown has located his Washington operations in the offices of the Allbaugh Co.

'Culture of Cronyism'

While the "Culture of corruption" is a phrase Democrats are trying to attach to the climate of sleaze encompassing the current occupants of the White House, the "culture of cronyism" is an apt phrase to describe the administration's hiring policies. Brown's incompetence, played out as it was in front of a national audience, was so apparent that it served as an entry point for reporters to delve into the issue of Bush Administration cronyism.

"Washington is a town where the best and the brightest usually coexist with well-connected political hacks," William Fisher wrote in a recent piece published by The Daily Star and numerous other outlets. "However, the Bush administration has taken promotion of the latter to embarrassing extremes, selecting unqualified people for posts because of their political loyalty and ideological persuasion," added Fisher who has managed economic development programs in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

While mentioning Brown, as well as Harriet Miers -- who was forced -- mostly by outraged conservatives -- to withdraw her name after being nominated by President Bush to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court -- Fisher's commentary homed in on another mediocre Bush appointment.

Bringing Paul Bonicelli on board

In an October 19, press release issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Andrew Natsios, Administrator for USAID, announced that, "Paul J. Bonicelli, Ph.D. joined the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) as the new Deputy Assistant Administrator." Bonicelli, the press release pointed out, "will primarily oversee the Agency's democracy and governance programs."

"Bonicelli's office will focus on four primary goals of strengthening the rule of law and respect for human rights; promoting more genuine and competitive elections and political processes; increasing development of a politically active civil society; and implementing a more transparent and accountable governance. Progress in all four areas is necessary to achieve sustainable democracy."

Bonicelli "has little experience in the field he has been tapped to supervise," Fisher noted. "The closest he comes to democracy promotion or good governance is having worked as a staffer for the Republican Party in the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives."

While working for the GOP is often a sure-fire ticket to an administration appointment, Bonicelli is also deeply rooted within the Christian right. Up until his USAID appointment, Bonicelli was the Dean of Academic Affairs at Patrick Henry College, a small fundamentalist school founded in 2000 to mainly serve home-schooled students. "Among the fundamentalist community, home-schooling is seen as a way to promote Christian values as an alternative to what is regarded as an increasingly secular and irreligious culture prevalent in public schools," Fisher explained.

Patrick Henry College

Michael P. Farris, a longtime Christian right activist is the founder and president of the Purcellville, Va.-based Patrick Henry College (website), whose motto is "For Christ and For Liberty." Located just 50 miles from the nation's capital, it bills itself as "one of America's top ten conservative colleges," a designation given it last November by the conservative Young America's Foundation (YAF), "a nationwide campus outreach organization dedicated to the promotion of conservative values."

Farris is a member of the Board of Directors of Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation and belonged to the ultra-right secretive Council for National Policy. He is an attorney who specializes in constitutional law, and in 1993 he was the Republican candidate for the office of lieutenant governor of Virginia (he lost). Farris is also the author of "Where Do I Draw the Line," "Constitutional Law for Christian Students," "Home Schooling and the Law," and "The Homeschooling Father."

Farris, however, made his mark as founder and president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, which was set up in 1983 to promote home schooling among Christian families.

Patrick Henry College's mission, as adopted by the Board of Trustees September 28, 2002, is "to train Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding. In order to accomplish this mission, the College provides academically excellent higher education with a biblical worldview using classical liberal arts core curriculum and apprenticeship methodology." Its vision is "to aid in the transformation of American society by training Christian students to serve God and mankind with a passion for righteousness, justice and mercy, through careers of public service and cultural influence."

According to Fischer, the school "requires ... all of its 300 students sign a 10-part 'statement of faith' declaring, among other things, that they believe 'Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, is God come in the flesh'; that 'Jesus Christ literally rose bodily from the dead'; and that hell is a place where 'all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.'"

In addition, faculty members "must sign a pledge stating they share a generally literalist belief in the Bible," Fisher reported. "Revealingly, only biology and theology teachers are required to hold a literal view specifically of the Bible's six-day creation story."

Even though there are only 240 students enrolled, the college is flush: It "gets so much money from right-wing Christian donors that it operates without debt and yet charges just $15,000 a year for tuition," the Independent's Andrew Buncombe reported in January 2004.

Buncombe described the College as a campus out of some other time: "Students must obey a curfew, wear their hair neatly and dress 'modestly.'If they wish to hold hands with a member of the opposite sex, they must do so while walking: standing while holding hands is not permitted. And students must sign an honor pledge that bans them from drinking alcohol unless under parental supervision." In addition, "The MTV and VH1 pop-culture channels are blocked from campus televisions because their contents are considered inappropriate [and] the students' computers are set up with a program called Covenant Eyes, which monitors the websites they visit."

In addition to Farris and Janet Ashcroft, the wife of the then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, PHC's Board of Trustees includes: Chairman Jack W. Haye, a Senior Vice President of Wells Fargo Bank; Vice Chairman Paul De Pree, Ph.D., a Senior Project Leader with the Dow Chemical Company; Ramon Ardizzone, Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Glenayre Technologies, Inc.; Kenneth L. Connor, J.D., an attorney with Wilkes & McHugh, P.A. and the former head of the Family Research Council; Barbara Hodel, Vice President of the Summit Energy Group and the wife of Don Hodel who recently retired as President and Chief Executive Officer of Focus on the Family; James R. Leininger, M.D., the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Kinetic Concepts, Inc. and a longtime funder and supporter of the privatization of public schools; Russell B. Pulliam, the Associate Editor of the Indianapolis Star; Wilfred S. Templeton, the President and CEO of Ft. Myers Toyota; and John E. Urban, a Partner (Retired) with Goldman Sachs.

Heading for the Beltway

While none of these rules are especially unusual given that PHC is a strictly run Christian school, Buncombe reported that what separates it from other "right-wing Christian college[s]" is the extremely close relationship it has "with the Bush administration and the Republican establishment." Writing in January 2004, Buncombe reported that, "Over the past four years, 22 conservative members of Congress have employed one or more Patrick Henry interns."

"The number of interns [from Patrick Henry] going into the White House scares me to death," Nancy Keenan, of People for the American Way, told Buncombe. "People have a right to choose [where their children are educated], but we are concerned that they are not exposed to the kind of diversity this country has. They are training people with a limited ideological and political view. If these young people are going into positions of power, they have to govern with all people in mind, not just a limited number."

And that's where Paul Bonicelli comes in. Though he "has scant credentials for his new post, he and his institution enjoy close ties to the Bush administration and to fundamentalist religious groups that form such a critical part of the president's base," Fisher wrote. "Many Patrick Henry students have been chosen to serve as interns working for White House political adviser Karl Rove, for the White House Office of Public Liaison, and for Republican members of the House and Senate." In addition, when President Bush signed legislation banning so-called partial-birth abortion, Farris was one of five Christian conservatives attending the signing ceremonies in the Oval Office.

Explaining the internships with Republicans, Bonicelli said that "Most students' values don't link up with [those of] the Democrats."

"In 2002, Bush appointed Bonicelli--along with former Vatican adviser John Klink and Janice Crouse of the ultra-conservative Concerned Women for America [where Farris once served as general counsel] -- to an American delegation attending a United Nations children's conference, where they sought to promote biblical values in U.S. foreign policy. This sparked angry protests from groups advocating women's rights and the separation of church and state."

In an unholy alliance, Bonicelli and his fellow delegates lined up with Libya, Sudan, and a number of other Islamic states -- to form a "culture war" voting bloc at the United Nations.

"This alliance shows the depths of perversity of the [U.S.] position," Adrienne Germaine, president of the International Women's Health Coalition, told the Washington Post. "On the one hand we're presumably blaming these countries for unspeakable acts of terrorism, and at the same time we are allying ourselves with them in the oppression of women."

As The New Republic noted in its short follow-up piece to "Welcome to the Hackocracy," "If bringing democracy to the Middle East is the Bush administration's crusade (and Muslims have been very touchy about Bush's use of that word), why not put a real evangelist in charge? No doubt Muslims the world over will welcome someone [Bonicelli] looking to save them, not just from oppressive regimes, but from 'conscious torment for eternity' as well."

Reader Comments

Absolutely fabulous article. It tells the story necessary for building change. Very important information to know.

--- Tamara Baltar | 12-19-2005 | 6:46 am

Great article. Hopefully it opens some eyes. I know a few fundamentalists who believe that the task at hand for Christians is the precipitation of Armageddon in the Middle East. Unbelievable, yet... The White House has declined to comment of Bush's position regarding "the end times."

--- Henry Powhatan | 12-20-2005 | 8:53 am

This article brings an issue that should even disturb those on the Right and bears investigation. I recently read another article which clearly reveals the underlying agenda that President Bush in trying to implement through a "dominionist mandate." The article is "Dominionism and the Rise of Christian Imperialism" by Sarah Leslie and can be found and read at www.discernment-ministries.org. There are many on the Right that have serious concerns that may agree with the issues raised trying to recruit fundamentalists.

--- Steve Muse | 12-21-2005 | 1:47 pm