Evil and incompetent

I have been saying for the last few years that the thing that makes the Bush cabal so dangerous is that they are not only evil they are also incompetent. The only thing they are good at is politics. They are good at winning elections but incapable of governing. Harold Meyerson covers the incompetent side in his commentary today, Bush the Incompetent.

Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it's hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things -- particularly when most of them were the president's own initiatives.

In numbing profusion, the newspapers are filled with litanies of screw-ups. Yesterday's New York Times brought news of the first official assessment of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq, in which the government's special inspector general depicted a policy beset, as Times reporter James Glanz put it, "by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting [and] secrecy." At one point, rebuilding efforts were divided, bewilderingly and counterproductively, between the Army Corps of Engineers and, for projects involving water, the Navy. That's when you'd think a president would make clear in no uncertain terms that bureaucratic turf battles would not be allowed to impede Iraq's reconstruction. But then, the president had no guiding vision for how to rebuild Iraq -- indeed, he went to war believing that such an undertaking really wouldn't require much in the way of American treasure and American lives.

It's not poor Dubya's fault, as we have said here often It's all about Cheney> G.W. has never been more than the front man for someone who both members of the Reagan and Bush I administrations thought was a nut case. So the question is, is it incompetence or mental illness? Cheney believes what he believes and ignores any evidence that is contrary. That explains the Iraq debacle. As for Katrina, that's not so much incompetence as gross dereliction of duty. It's what happens when you place unqualified political operatives in positions of authority.

So it's hard to argue against the argument that the Bush administration has fucked up everything they have touched, but is it incompetence?