Friday, December 30, 2005

Fast Times at Bush High

Krugman has a heck of a column laying out just how much of an incompetent Bush has been revealed to be in the past year. On a scale undreamt of in Peter Jackson's wildest imaginations, this has been a year of "The Emperor has no clothes" moments.

It's behind the NY Times stupid pay-firewall, but word has a way of spreading. Like that list last month of the service record of prominent Democrats vs. that of the GOP, these are things I think we all knew, but it almost takes your breath away to see it all laid out in black-and-white.

Herewith a few excerpts.

A year ago, Mr. Bush made many Americans feel safe, because they believed that he would be decisive and effective in an emergency. But Mr. Bush was apparently oblivious to the first major domestic emergency since 9/11. According to Newsweek, aides to Mr. Bush finally decided, days after Hurricane Katrina struck, that they had to show him a DVD of TV newscasts to get him to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

A year ago, Howard Dean - who was among the very few prominent figures to question Colin Powell's prewar presentation to the United Nations, and who warned, while hawks were still celebrating the fall of Baghdad, that the occupation of Iraq would be much more difficult than the initial invasion - was considered flaky and unsound.

A year ago, it was clear that before the Iraq war, the administration suppressed information suggesting that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to build nuclear weapons. Yet few people in Washington or in the news media were willing to say that the nation was deliberately misled into war until polls showed that most Americans already believed it.

No comments: