1 Boring Old Man

What Has Bush Done to the Government?

The last two times the Pew Research Center asked people to describe President Bush in a single word, chief among the overwhelmingly negative responses was the word "incompetent." What makes that particularly fascinating is that it’s a realization that the public has reached pretty much on its own.

There’s one on the back of my truck. My friends say that I’m safe up here in rural North Georgia. No one, they claim, is going to vandalize my car because no one knows what it means. But I know what it means. It came to me in early 2005 when I realized that I was getting clinically depressed because Bush had been re-elected. I wasn’t in love with John Kerry. It wasn’t that. I just couldn’t accept that Americans had re-elected George W. Bush as President.  At the time, the only sense I could make of it was that the Religious Right and the Traditional Conservatives had voted their ideological bias and ignored the fact that George W. Bush couldn’t think his way out of a telephone booth. The man is grossly incompetent – grossly incompetent!

The elder Bush assumed that the Bush family trust and its trustees — James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar — would take the erstwhile wastrel and guide him on the path of wisdom. In this conception, the country was not entrusted to the younger Bush’s care so much as Bush was entrusted to the care of the trustees. He was the beneficiary of the trust. But to the surprise of those trustees, he slipped the bonds of the trust and cut off the family trustees. They knew he was ill-prepared and ignorant, but they never expected him to be assertive. They wrongly assumed that Cheney would act for them as a trustee.

Cheney had worked with and for them for decades and seemed to agree with them, if not on every detail then on the more important matter of attitude, particularly the question of who should govern. The elder Bush had helped arrange for Cheney to become the CEO of Halliburton, making him a very rich man at last. But Bush, Baker, Scowcroft et al. didn’t realize that Cheney’s apparent concurrence was to advance himself and his views, which were not theirs. When absolute power was conferred on him, the habits of deference lapsed, no longer necessary. ("Thank you for the privilege of serving today.") Cheney was always more Rumsfeld oriented than Bush oriented. The elder Bush knew that Rumsfeld despised him and that Cheney was close to Rumsfeld, just as he knew his son’s grievous limitations. But the obvious didn’t occur to him — that Cheney would seize control of the lax son for his own purposes. The elder Bush committed a monumental error, empowering a regent to the prince who would betray the father. The myopia of the old WASP aristocracy allowed him to see Cheney as a member of his club. Cheney, for his part, was extremely convincing in playing possum. The elder Bush has many reasons for self-reproach, but perhaps none greater than being outsmarted by a courtier he thought was his trustee.

So, I’m ecstatic to read what Froomkin has to say today about Bush’s incompetence and his populating the government with ideologues – most of whom are equally incompetent. Some of Bush’s appointments have been competent ideologues – dangerous in a different way. But mostly, he’s filled the government with "good job Brownies" and Alberto Gonzales types. In the most educated and enlightened country in the world, our President has sought out dreadfully mediocre people who are loyal Bushies. I can just hear him saying, "I know! Let’s put Harriet on the Supreme Court!" I’ll bet even the people who hang around him rolled their eyes at that one.