Exposed and Crumbling
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Bush's Presidency
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Exposed and Crumbling
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by Margaret Carlson
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Back in the days when President George W. Bush preferred his endles summer at the ranch to storm chasing, few mistakes stuck to him. He was like the guy who drove through the car wash with his top down but never got wet. No weapons of mass destruction in a country we're stuck in? Well, you must understand, he really thought they were there. At this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, Bush showed a video of himself pretending to look for the weapons under his desk. Oh what a difference a hurricane makes. Katrina exposed something we couldn't know before: Bush's claim that he would keep us safer than that wishy-washy senator from squishy Massachusetts is false. Not only are we not safer than we were before Bush took office, we're worse off. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, as its Katrina response made tragically clear, is a mess. The Department of Homeland Security, which Bush built from scratch, is mainly known for a color chart, wasteful spending, a mixed bag of airport screeners and a new chief who didn't know the New Orleans Superdome was filled with starving, homeless hurricane victims. Duct Tape Defense Here in Washington, there's no feasible evacuation plan. If terrorists struck, the president and vice president would helicopter out. The rest of us -- and that includes many members of Congress -- would be stuck. I picture myself with duct tape and Saran Wrap, huddling in the basement or in a VW with a leaking sunroof idling for hours on the 14th Street Bridge. The White House press, which laughed at Bush's video, has been rightly chastised for turning out pool reports on what the president is wearing, eating or chopping. Now they're pounding away at his multiple fuel-squandering trips to hurricane-stricken regions where he can repair little but himself. A pool report on Sept. 26, the day Bush discovered energy conservation and suggested we all forgo non-essential driving, detailed the gas-sucking trip he took that evening to dinner five blocks away from the White House, commandeering five sport- utility vehicles, four vans and two limousines that kept their motors running for the duration of the meal. Brown's Lament Until recently, Bush's attitude toward governing -- it's easy, don't sweat the small stuff, do it on the cheap -- was tolerated, if not admired. Why not pick Michael Brown, a guy who knows a guy, even to run a life-or-death agency like FEMA? Why not, after he screws up big time, praise him? Why not, after you finally ease him out, keep paying him as a consultant? At the Kabuki hearings two days ago that pretended to get to the bottom of the fiasco, Republicans who'd been given the word by Karl Rove to concentrate on scapegoating and Swift-Boating Louisiana's Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco were shocked by Brown's arrogance. Brown said faith-based institutions, not FEMA, were supposed to help low-income people and that he warned folks higher up the food chain that FEMA was ``emaciated.'' In one Rodney King moment, he said everything would have been fine if only Louisiana officials had all gotten along. It didn't work. When Republican Christopher Shays, off Rove's script, said he was glad Brown was gone, Brown whined, ``I guess you want me to be this superhero that is going to step in there and suddenly take everybody out of New Orleans.'' And Now DeLay The unmasking of Brown may force Bush to withdraw the nomination of another pal of a pal to head up a crucial agency, Immigration and Naturalization. Pre-hurricane, Julie Myers, General Richard Myers's niece and the wife of the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, would have sailed through. It wouldn't have mattered before, but now her non-relevant experience working on Bill Clinton's impeachment and her lack of relevant experience working on immigration may hold her up. In the realm of when it rains, it pours, other pillars of Bush's carefully constructed world are crumbling. The latest is Tom DeLay, the majority leader who yesterday was indicted for campaign contributions that helped give Bush four more Republicans in the House of Representatives. Even Bush's hand-picked Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wouldn't be taking quite such a pummeling if his sale of stock in his family founded HCA Inc. had happened during Bush's glory days. Both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating. Lights Out Frist, who always contended he didn't even know if his blind trust held HCA stock, had an imminent need to sell what he didn't know he owned just before its price fell almost 10 percent this summer. He may not be Martha Stewart, but his new-found desire, after two terms in office, to avoid a conflict of interest when he considers health-care legislation no longer gets a pass. When your mojo fades, little things mean a lot. Two days ago, White House press spokesman Scott McClellan said the president is so gung-ho on saving energy (this after a previous spokesman said Bush's answer to the prospect of energy conservation was a ``big N-O''), he's personally reminding staff ``to turn off lights and printers and copiers and computers when they leave the office.'' Someone should remind the president of an earlier chief executive whose decline was hastened when he made a point of turning down the thermostat and donning a cardigan. When you elevate the trivial to policy because the meaningful stuff has gotten away from you, someone will soon be turning the lights out for you. Margaret Carlson, who was a columnist and deputy Washington bureau chief for Time magazine, is a columnist for Bloomberg News. © 2005 Bloomberg L.P
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What do you want, Margaret, to enlarge every major artery leading out of every city in the country to a couple of hundred lanes, with gasoline pumping stations installed every mile, each with tanks holding a several thousand gallon supply? And since all that gas will have to be on hand at all times, and since it will spoil periodically, a few hundred million gallons will have to be thrown away on a regular basis. So how many trillions of dollars do you suppose all of this going to cost?
The real problem is, we've lost all sense of individual responsibilty. The vast majority of our citizens are infected, to a greater or lesser degree, with the welfare entitlement mentality, looking to the Federal government to guarantee everyone a 100% risk free existence. This has led to a vertibale Everest of regulatory legislation and the asscoiated bureaucratic apparatus that only makes the problem worse. How? By setting the government up to be taken over by the giant multi-national coorporations (see the recent K Street artcile), which establish themselves as a Fourth Branch of government whose officers, the bill writers and lobbyists, are unelected appointees whose only accountablity is to the corporations who appointed them to make sure all regulations the Congress passes are beneficial to their bottom lines, and the health, welfare, and happiness of the people be damned.
And make no mistake, the solution is not to get a different party in power to "reform" the system. Both parties are equally susceptible to corruption, and have contributed equally to the existing nightmare. The system is fundamentally flawed and the entire regulatory mountain needs to be bulldozed into oblivion, with the government limited to prosecuting for fraud, adulteration, etc., i.e. actual injury. It must be constitutionally forbidden to continue to throwing trillions of dollars into the inherently unattainable chimera of consumer protection by regulation, recognizing that the only real protection the consumer can have is the competition for reputation by companies operating free of government regulation, as they did during the early centuries when all this country's wealth was created. (Comment this)