Bury Me Broken

Bush Administration Ineptitude Scarier than Scandals

Bob Herbert of the New York Times in an editorial 24 Oct said that the Bush administration may be under possible indictments but cannot be prosecuted for their biggest offense - "its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence."

Herbert then quotes Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then Sec. of State Colin Powell in an address last week to a public policy institute.

""We have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran," said Mr. Wilkerson. "Generally, with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita ... we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

The investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is the most sensational story coming out of Washington at the moment. But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going "Tick, tick, tick . . ." What is the next disaster that this crowd will be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring from its ideological bag of tricks?

"The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

When the time came to implement the decisions, said Mr. Wilkerson, they were "presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out." "

Wilkerson goes on to talk about the excessive and problematic secrecy of the administration, a disinterested Bush in international affairs and the danger of pulling out now is arming 5 million Middle Easterners that we will ultimately have to face.

The entire article is a necessary read.

[Source: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102405Z.shtmla]

posted by niteskolar @ 6:17 AM