Arlington Cemetery grave offenses

When I heard a story on the news about problems at Arlington Cemetery, I said to my husband, tongue in cheek, "It's probably Bush's fault." And that was the slant. Reporter said that computerization the last 8 years hadn't happened. Apparently paper records sufficed for years, but computer mix-ups (remember Obama wants this for all our health records) are Bush's fault. So I tried to google the story, first finding nothing, and it finally appeared as an "investigative report" on Salon.com, where CBS must have found it. Hmmm. That story, which draws its report from some disgruntled former employees, and the cemetery's long standing rule of cleaning out memorials like photos, flowers, notes (many cemeteries do this) reports:

At the center of the chaos is [Thurman] Higginbotham, [Gina]Gray's former superior and a focus of the Army investigation [Gray was fired and is one source for the story]. While cemetery Superintendent John Metzler is the titular head at Arlington, Higginbotham runs the show, say current and former employees. A tall and imposing man, Higginbotham has worked at the cemetery since 1965. He started as a security guard and worked his way up to deputy supervisor in 1990. In his current position, he has earned a reputation for running the cemetery with an iron fist. (Higginbotham declined to talk to Salon.)

One of Higginbotham's failures, say employees, has been his inability to rectify disturbing discrepancies between burial records and information on headstones. For years, Arlington has struggled to replace paper-and-pen burial records with a satellite-aided system of tracking grave locations. "My goal is to have all the gravesites available online to the public, so people can look up a grave from home and print out a map that will show exactly where the gravesite is," Higginbotham told Government Computer News in April 2006. Such systems are standard at other cemeteries, like the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, nearly identical to Arlington in age and size. Yet an effort begun in 2000 to set up a similar system at Arlington remains unrealized."

Ah, there is it. The magic date. OK, Bush didn't take over until 2001, but basically, it must be his fault. Every failing of Congress, all the WMD misinformation that the Democrats promoted in the 90s, it's all Bush's fault. And Higginbotham's position since 1990? Oh well. Have you ever tried to fire a government employee? You can hardly vote out an elected one.