Incompetence
The more I think about it the more I conclude that the malaise the current administration finds itself in is due to ineptitude rather than malice. Sure many of its policies have had a hard anti-social edge: cutting health care payments to poor children can hardly be postioned as pro-social, even this regime’s spin masters would have a hard time with that. No, I am beginning to think that the nation’s problems stem from incompetence. There is a rot in our government that starts at the very top.
The Iraq war was started for all the wrong reasons: we were duped because we allowed ourselves to be driven by fear instead of our ideals. We were exploited. The Bush regime recklessly went looking for a fight to divert our attention away from its failure to bring bin Laden to heel. Bush’s complete incompetence then took over: he deliberately ignored anyone who dared question whether he had thought through the consequences of his actions. He particularly scorned anyone who suggested that the war would open up more problems than it solved. He simplisticly followed the rosy advice of his neo-con advisors. He was naive and stupid. The mire that is now Iraq is Bush’s to own. As Powell said: “you break it you own it”, and boy, does Bush own it.
Then there is Katrina. We now find out, via the video tape of a briefing session held before the storm hit, that he was completely aware of the situation, including the threat to those infamous levees. As a result we know he lied when he said that “no one could have predicted the failure of the levees”. He heard what we heard on the video tape: the failure was widely discussed as a strong possibility. We now know that his Homeland Security team was more interested in making Power Point presentations about organization charts than about disaster relief planning. We know that no one dared tell him the truth lest they be tarred as unpatriotic pessimists. And we saw, on the video tape, his complete disinterest in events: he failed to ask a single question. He had nothing to add to the discussion. He made no comment on the brief being given to him. He provided no leadership, no guidance, no insight, no energy, no anything. He disappeared right at the onset of one of the nation’s biggest natural disasters. He became a dwarf when we needed a giant. Nothing could so effectively strip him of the mantle of “wartime leader” than this video taped vapidity.
Then there is the recent prescription drug plan. The pattern is the same: critics are scorned, pragmatists are laughed at for being naysayers, experts are ignored, rosy scenarios are adopted and no effort is made to work for or on behalf the people, in this case the elderly infirm. The result: a completely fouled up execution of a willfully rotten piece of legislation.
No. This man deserves his place at the very bottom of the heap. His actions, rather than his words, are his measure. His monument is one of unrelenting and uncaring incompetence. He is in way over his head. Hopefully the body politic can withstand his presence at the helm for the rest of his term. Mercifully we will be done with him in a couple of years. Given his lack of popularity and inability to change he has made himself irrelevant. Let’s hope he is sufficiently stupid to stay that way, lest he does more damage before he goes.
