Bushness As Usual

Anyone expecting the Katrina disaster to turn President Bush in a new direction is bound for disappointment. Bush is applying the same strategy for mismanagement and failure he has relied on in the past, putting Karl Rove in charge of the Gulf Coast reconstruction, a man who is one filing away from indictment, has no disaster recovery experience and who can be fairly described as one of the most partisan, divisive, mean-spirited, underhanded political operatives in a generation. As Bill Maher puts it, “Doesn’t the President know more than three people?” Rove is already enlisting his usual cronies, including fraud-convicted Haliburton, likely turning the reconstruction into another pork-barrel windfall for Republican CEOs and country club buddies.

Regarding the massive reconstruction tab, Bush is taking tax increases off the table. As a person who dislikes and distrusts government, low taxes are sacred to the President, though he has no problem spending a lot more than the government takes in. More importantly, Bush would have no campaign promise left to stand on were he to raise taxes, opening his party to criticism in the next election cycle. So he is planning to borrow the money, adding it to the enormous mountain of Iraq-war debt piling up. Our children will be footing the bill with interest, and they don’t vote yet. By the time they do, maybe Bush and his party will have gotten lucky.

As the saying goes, better lucky than good. And since the Bush Administration has proved itself so inept, so beholden to big business, so habituated to cronyism, so blinded by arrogance and so poor in decision making, luck is all they have left to hope for.