I agree with Jack
George W. Bush is the first president to have
Irish Pennants
By jkelly
a master's degree in business administration. Let's hope he's the last.
I like President Bush, and I support most of what he's trying to do. But I'm amazed, astonished and appalled by the stumbling, bumbling way he often goes about it. The friends as well as the critics of this administration have reason to wonder whether these guys can organize a two car funeral.
The most controversial decision Mr. Bush has made is, of course, his decision to go to war in Iraq. I continue to believe this was the right thing to do. But once the decision was made to go to war, one egregious mistake was piled on top of another. I'm flabbergasted that it took the president until last December (and a thrashing at the polls the preceding month) to recognize that protecting the Iraqi people is the key to success.
Most of the mistakes were made not by Mr. Bush himself, but by subordinates. But it was Mr. Bush who appointed -- or left in place -- the subordinates who screwed up.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Mr. Bush's management style is that he neither rewards success nor punishes failure. This tends to result in less success and more failure. A case in point is Gen. George Casey. He's a fine man, but for two years he presided over a strategy in Iraq which, to put it most kindly, wasn't working. Abraham Lincoln would have fired him. So would Franklin Roosevelt. Mr. Bush is making Gen. Casey chief of staff of the Army.
The flaws in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina existed mostly in the fevered imaginations of journalists and Democratic politicians. The most egregious mistakes were made by the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana, not by federal officials. But while the Coast Guard and the military were magnificent, and many at the worker bee level in the Federal Emergency Management Agency performed well, those at or near the top of FEMA did not. President Bush's praise of the hapless Michael Brown (Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job) belongs in the managerial cluelessness hall of fame.
New Defense Secretary Robert Gates responded appropriately to the revelations in the Washington Post of the squalid conditions in which some of our wounded soldiers are being kept. He fired the general commanding Walter Reed Army hospital, and demanded the resignation of the Secretary of the Army.
But the problems at the hospital didn't arise yesterday. How could Army officials, military and civilian, have overlooked them for so long? President Bush can't be expected to monitor himself day to day conditions at Walter Reed, but this is a well deserved black eye for his administration.
The conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for allegedly lying about something that wasn't a crime is the latest bit of evidence of incompetence in the Bush Administration.
That this case went to trial is chiefly the result of truly awesome mendacity by Joseph C. Wilson IV, many journalists, Democrats in Congress, and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But missteps by the Bushies played a significant role.
The "Bush lied" meme essentially began when Mr. Wilson charged that President Bush was lying when he said in his 2003 State of the Union address that "the British government has learned Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." But the president poured gasoline on the fire when he apologized for the sentence, even though every word of it was true. (Saddam did try to buy uranium in Africa, concluded the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Robb-Silberman commission on prewar intelligence, and the British Butler Commission.)
The White House also put Mr. Libby -- who was then chief of staff to the vice president -- in an awkward position by authorizing him to leak portions of the October, 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (which proved Mr. Wilson was lying), instead of straightforwardly declassifying the relevant portions of the document, as the president ultimately did.
I'm outraged by the way some in the CIA have played politics with intelligence. But I'm also appalled by the extent to which President Bush has permitted people who ostensibly work for him to buffalo, bamboozle and betray him, without consequence. The president is supposed to run the government. But this president lets the bureaucracy run roughshod over him.
Part of the reason I'm attracted to Rudy Giuliani is because, for better or worse (and it was mostly very much for the better), he ran the city of New York. It's nice to have a president who means well. It'd be nicer to have a president who actually does well. |
