“Who’s In Charge Here, Anyway?! . . . oops . . .”

by KTK

March 24th, 2006

E. J. Dionne has a great insight into Bush’s bizarrely distanced take on his own administration’s ineptness.

[At] Bush’s news conference this week . . . he sounded like someone who has no control over the government he is in charge of. His words were those of a pundit inveighing against the evils of bureaucrats.

“Obviously,” said the critic in chief, “there are some times when government bureaucracies haven’t responded the way we wanted them to, and like citizens, you know, I don’t like that at all.” Yes, and if you can’t do something about it, who can?

Bush went on: “I mean, I think, for example, of the trailers sitting down in Arkansas. Like many citizens, they’re wondering why they’re down there, you know. How come we’ve got 11,000?”

Bush was talking about 10,777 mobile homes ordered up to provide housing for the victims of Hurricane Katrina [and never delivered]. . . .

Nearly three months after [Rep.] Ross first complained about the homes sitting in the field — and nearly six weeks after Fox News reported the story and CNN broadcast an extensive account — Bush seemed perplexed. He insisted that he was asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to get to the bottom of the deal.

“So I’ve asked Chertoff to find out,” Bush said. “What are you going to do with them? I mean, the taxpayers aren’t interested in 11,000 trailers just sitting there. Do something with them. And so I share that sense of frustration when a big government is unable to, you know — sends wrong signals to taxpayers. But our people are good, hardworking people.”

Hold on: The president of the United States runs the “big government” he’s attacking. This is mysterious. If Bush’s “good, hardworking people” aren’t responsible for the problem, the villains of the piece must be alien creatures created by some strange beast called Big Government. . . .

This episode is important because it is representative of a corrosive style of politics. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans have done a good business over the years running against the ills of Big Government. They are so much in the habit of trashing government that even when they are in charge of things — remember, Republicans have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for all but 18 months since 2001 — they pretend they are not.

And when their own government fails, they turn around and use their incompetence to argue that government can never work anyway, so you might as well keep electing conservatives to have less government. It’s an ideological Catch-22. Even their failures prove they are right.

It’s more than just the general incompetence of the administration - the icing on the cake is their continual attitude that that incompetence is somebody else’s fault, or in fact that their own failures were actually conducted by somebody else. Reagan was the Teflon President - there was no question he was stupid, ignorant, and out of the loop on every idiotic scheme cooked up right in his presence, but for some reason those facts insulated him from responsibility for his own administration. Bush, however, is the IDunno President - the little boy who’s always standing there with cookie crumbs all over his face saying “I dunno . . .!” And he’s unembarrassed to take that stance, again and again, on every policy, every scandal, every fiasco, every bad prediction gone diastrously wrong. He honestly believes that he is in no way implicated in the things his own administration does. It flows from his airy disconnection from his own past: a series of bankruptcies following from unearned, multi-million-dollar handouts and subsidies from favor-seekers in no way reflects on his being “the first MBA President”; his unconscionable line–jumping into a prestigious non-combat position during the Vietnam War, immediatly followed by egregiously irresponsible performance in the job - including the fact that he actually abandoned his flight duties while an officer in the National Guard in wartime - leaves him completely unembarrassed at staging a faked-up carrier jet landing and strutting around in a flight suit for the news cameras; his vague dismissal of his earlier illegal drug use (”When I was young and irresponsible, I was over 40 years old, drunk and coke-addicted, bankrupt, unemployed, several-times-arrested, on the verge of divorce, and irresponsible”) only fuels his punitive moralizing about everyone else’s lifestyles. He sees no connection between his behavior or job performance and the evaluations others are entitled to make of him. And he sees no connection between the miserable failures of his presidency and his own performance as President. As Dionne notes, he doesn’t even seem to believe that he has any role in, let alone responsibility for them.

Why don’t we just build him a fake village, give him a sun bonnet and a few ducks to watch over, and let him live out his Marie Antoinette fantasy life in peace while the rest of us recover our country?

Categories: Culture, General, Politics |