The Disconnect

by hilzoy

I agree with Edward that Bush may or may not have known that the electricity that illuminated his speech was turned off after he left. More generally, though, I don't "wonder if the blame for the President's obvious disconnect from reality shouldn't be placed at the feet of his handlers." For one thing, the President is an adult, and he is perfectly capable of asking his handlers questions, or for that matter turning on the news. For another, as far as I can tell, his disconnection from reality is caused by his failure to take steps that any competent manager would take to ensure that he knew what was going on.

The bubble the President lives in is described in this passage from a Newsweek story:

"The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority."

So we learn what we've heard before: that George W. Bush gets his information from his staff. For some reason, however, it wasn't clear to me before Katrina that all, in this case, really does mean all: that he is so completely insulated from normal news sources that he really didn't understand how serious Katrina was until that Thursday night.

I mean: that's really astonishing. I have a hard time understanding how it would be possible for someone not to have begun to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe that struck New Orleans for three whole days. How exactly would someone manage that? And why would he want to? Thoreau thought that we should not concern ourselves with the ephemeral trivia that make up the news, but frankly,that has always been one of the (few) things that bothers me about him. Moreover, Thoreau was a hermit, not the President of the United States.

Moreover, to put it gently, George W. Bush has never been a President notable either for his store of knowledge or for his intellectual curiosity. Other Presidents might bring to the job a detailed knowledge of, say, trade policy or Chinese history or conflicts over water rights; this President does not.

While I would never recommend that anyone in a position of authority rely entirely on staff for information, however, I think it is possible to do so without disaster, if you take certain steps and stick to them religiously. First, of course, you need to have a very, very good staff whose judgment you trust. Second, you and your staff need to be very clear about the dangers of this approach. They need to be absolutely prepared to tell you anything, however unwelcome; and you need to do everything in your power to make sure that they feel free to do so. Because if you are completely dependent on your staff for all your information, the worst thing that could possibly happen is that they become afraid to tell you certain things. If that happens, your view of reality will become more and more distorted; and since that information is the basis for your decisions, those decisions will become less and less grounded in reality. And in a President, that's potentially disastrous.

The response to Katrina, and the reporting about it, make it clear that the Bush administration has not taken these sorts of basic precautions, which are absolutely essential for a President who gets all his information from his staff. In fact, Bush's staff are apparently terrified of bringing him bad news. From the same Newsweek story:

"It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed."

(I note with amazement that on Aug. 30, a day after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through the Gulf states, breached New Orleans' levees, and largely destroyed a great city, the 'bad news' was that Bush would have to cut his vacation short.)

Or consider this anecdote from a story by Time:

"Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term. "Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, 'All right. I understand. Good job.' He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.""

It's a really bad idea to get all your information from your staff. It's also a really bad idea to react to criticism or bad news in ways that make people afraid to offer them. But together they are disastrous. Because what they mean is that the President's only source of information is the very same staff who are terrified to tell him anything he doesn't want to hear.

This is not managerial rocket science. It is not a deep and arcane mystery known only to a few. It is elementary common sense applied to running an organization. That Bush does not seem to have thought about it -- unlike most of his predecessors, who (as noted in the Newsweek story) all kept people around who would tell them bad news -- is just one more piece of evidence that he neither knows nor (apparently) cares what it takes to run an organization successfully.

It also explains a few stories that I had always found puzzling. For instance, Bush was still saying that representatives who voted against his Social Security proposal would pay a price with voters well after it was clear that that proposal was deeply unpopular. (I can't find a cite for this; it was on TPM, and as you might imagine, searching TPM for 'Bush' and 'Social Security' yields an impossible number of results.) I wondered at the time why he was doing that, but I didn't really credit the possibility that he might actually not know how unpopular it was. Now, however, that seems like the most likely explanation.

Ask yourself what else he might just not know. Until Katrina, I would have thought that there were limits to how out of touch he could be. Now, though, I really don't think that there are. With this set-up, he could easily think, for instance, that everything he does is incredibly popular, that Afghanistan is a model democracy, and Iraq is just brimming with newly painted schools and citizens whose enjoyment of their newfound liberties is interrupted only by the occasional rush of gratitude towards the President who made it all possible. For all I know, he could believe that faced with his implacable resolve, Kim Jong Il has decided that defeat is inevitable and resigned from power, or that Osama bin Laden has been captured. If this is how he gets his information, then believing things like this, which would be impossible for the rest of us, are possible for him. And that's a terrifying thought.

***

His response to Katrina also makes it pretty clear that Bush is not very good at a cognitive task that I'll describe as appreciating what things mean: the capacity that allows a person to hear a sentence and understand what its full import. The more you have this capacity, the less difference it will make whether you read a description of something or see it in real life or on TV: your mind will fill the gap between the words and the reality, and allow you to understand exactly what a sentence like "eighty per cent of New Orleans will be uninhabitable" actually means for those who are there.

We know that Bush was briefed on Katrina by the head of the National Hurricane Center on the Sunday before the storm made landfall. That was the day the NOAA put out the terrifying alert about "DEVASTATING DAMAGE" and "HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS." While I don't know exactly what the head of the National Hurricane Center said in his briefing, it seems like a pretty safe bet that it should have been alarming, and that he said things like: New Orleans might be almost completely flooded, and rendered uninhabitable.

And yet, after hearing this, Bush did not cancel the rest of his vacation. (And, yes, I know that there are telephones and videoconferencing equipment in Crawford, but as a person who sometimes works from home, I also know that there is a difference between being in one's office and being in phone contact.) He did not cancel his appearances over the next few days, so that he could stay in touch with the relief and recovery efforts, and make sure that whatever needed to be done was being done. He did not, apparently, make sure that the Department of Homeland Security stood ready to declare Katrina an Incident of National Significance (although, as Josh Marshall points out, while the administration seems to have thought this was needed, it's not clear that they were right.) He doesn't seem to have done any of the things that one might imagine a President might do on hearing that there was a good chance an American city was about to be destroyed.

One might explain the President's failure to do any of these things by saying something like: he doesn't care about the sufferings of others, or the destruction of a city. But I don't think this is right. Whatever questions anyone might have about George W. Bush's capacity for empathy, there is no question about his interest in political spin. And that alone should have propelled him into action, or at least a photogenic facsimile thereof. But it did not.

The only sense I can make of this is that Bush is not very good either at moving from sentences like "New Orleans might be almost completely flooded, and rendered uninhabitable" to an appreciation of the reality they describe, or at understanding the implications of such a sentence. He can hear a sentence like that and genuinely not understand what it means: that a serious crisis is about to occur, one that will require his immediate attention, and in which his response will be very important. (This would also explain why, after hearing the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB -- the one that said 'Osama bin Laden determined to attack in US' -- he went out and cleared more brush.)

This is a bad capacity for a President to lack. A lot of what a President learns, he learns through such sentences. (As noted above. Bush probably learns everything this way, since he doesn't watch the news on TV.) Moreover, predictions of future events almost have to come in the form of sentences, rather than images of the actual events. A president who cannot fully appreciate what they mean, on whom they do not really register, will not respond to them appropriately. And this is really bad news.

When you put this together with what I discussed earlier, you get a President who often gets distorted information to start with, and does not fully appreciate the information he does receive. When you combine this with some of Bush's other failings -- his willingness to appoint idiots like Michael Brown to positions of great responsibility, his lack of intellectual curiosity, and his apparent indifference both to the details of policy and to the business of actually governing -- it's a recipe for disaster.

When you're an adult, you are responsible for knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, and acting accordingly. I, for instance, have thought about my strengths and weaknesses, and have concluded that I should spare the world the sight of me trying to play professional basketball. More seriously, I would never run for President, since I am absent-minded enough that I really might leave the nuclear football on a bus. George W. Bush should have known himself well enough to know that he wasn't suited for the job either. And so should we.

***

I'll close with one other snippet from the Time article:

"Bush has always said the Presidency is about doing big things, and a friend who chatted with him one evening in July said he seemed to be craving a fresh mission even though the one he has pursued in Iraq is far from being on a steady footing. "He was looking for the next really important thing to do," the friend said. "You could hear him almost sorting it out to himself. He just sort of figured it would come.""

Stop and think about this one for a second. Iraq is a mess. It needs Bush's urgent attention. Before Katrina, we were not by any stretch of the imagination in the sort of situation we'd have to be in in order for Bush's looking for the next big thing to do would make sense. Ezra Klein wrote this about the passage I just quoted:

"What worries me is that he's already extracted his Manichean satisfaction from that confrontation [Iraq] and, now bored by its inexorable descent into sectarian division, is willing to leave the Iraq cliffhanger floating and move onto the next cosmic clash. Little could be more dangerous. One of the requirements for holding the modern American presidency should be the possession of a serious attention span. If you want to engage in the sort of global remodeling that Bush does, it needs to be near inhuman -- they should be able to synthesize Ritalin from your nail clippings. That George seems more interested in knocking down the blocks rather than slowly, carefully, putting them back together is quite scary. That he seems ready to play Godzilla on another set is downright terrifying."

Terrifying is the word.

Comments

[Katherine]

I came to a very similar conclusion after reading this:

Over the last ten years I have worked very extensively in Uzbekistan, on occasion spending up to a month at a time there on business for banking clients. During this time I became closely acquainted with a number of leading figures at the Uzbek bar and heard many gripping stories of abuse and mistreatment of ordinary citizens at the hands of President Karimov's regime. Last year, a public commission which was looking into the situation there contacted me and I helped arrange a visit by commission members to Uzbekistan to look into freedom of conscience issues. I helped put them in touch with a Lutheran pastor who had been intimidated and mistreated, and several attorneys who represented Muslims who had been imprisoned and tortured. In Uzbekistan it is a grave offense to worship in any religious gathering which is not state-sponsored. As a result of US pressure, some room has opened up for Christians, but for Muslims, being caught worshipping other than at a state-sanctioned mosque is likely to be a life-altering experience. Severe beatings, lengthy "investigatory detention," incarceration in TB-laden workcamps is the norm. A prisoner's likelihood of survival at such camps is not much better than 50-50. And of course the famous cases of torture, such as boiling in water. All this reminds that the techniques of which Col Stoddart wrote so vividly in the 1840's continue, with technological enhancements, under Islam Karimov. One of the commissioners apparently challenged President Bush about this when the commission had a meeting with the president. Couldn't he issue an order prohibiting such renditions? Couldn't he issue an unequivocal order against torture? The president, the commissioner said, reacted with near rage. He angrily snapped "Who said that? We do not practice torture!" The commissioner repeated that the president needed to send a clear message to the government that torture was a taboo. The president scowled and walked away in disgust.

I think this is the most insightful sentence of this post:

"The only sense I can make of this is that Bush is not very good either at moving from sentences like "New Orleans might be almost completely flooded, and rendered uninhabitable" and the reality they describe, or at understanding the implications of such a sentence."

It's not just a lack of imagination though. He also seems to have a weird inability to perceive the dissonance between his rhetoric and the facts on the ground. "Compassionate conservatism" and the Texas death penalty mill. "America's values and interests are now one" and the detainee policies. I could give example after example.

[liberal japonicus]

Hilzoy,
I wonder if you are thinking about this TPM post. It is not about Social Security, but about the 9/11 commission. There was also this.

In this Hill column, Marshall lays out a number of 'out of touch' moments. Unfortunately, there are so many, that one could accuse Josh of playing Chicken Little.

Actually, I think that Bush (or at least his advisers) has shown more awareness on the bad reception of the Bush plan because at one point, when the plan was tanking, he siad that he didn't have a plan, and that all options were on the table.

[Donald Johnson]

Not meaning to equate the two in terms of scale, but I've read the reason 15-30 million people died during the Great Leap Forward was because Mao's underlings were afraid to tell him bad news.
Mao was another one of those poor managers.

[Edward]

It's not just a lack of imagination though. He also seems to have a weird inability to perceive the dissonance between his rhetoric and the facts on the ground.

That's because he doesn't write the rhetoric, and those who do write it don't address the facts on the ground when they write it...they keep their eyes on some future prize. They're forward looking, which one would normally assume was good, except, of course, when the present needs some attention.

I see the Bush (and to a large degree the Reagan) administration's central problem with being disconnected the fact that they believe their destiny to be unchangable. So long as they keep moving forward with the plan, all the little details will sort themselves out.

God reserves a special torment for fools like that, I'm convinced.

[Jay C.]

Great post, hilzoy; cogent and well-written as usual: but tell us: what exactly can we, or anyone actually DO about the situation?
So you are telling us (or, more accurately proving confirming information) that George W. Bush, as President, is a clueless empty suit? And a p*ss-poor manager, besides? I guess this revelation can be filed under "comment" rather than "news" because this is what at least half the country has been saying for the past five years.
As long as the modern Republican Machine is in charge of the government, though, Good Ol' Dubya will be held up as a shining exemplar of executive capability: when so many folks have a vested interest in supplying the Emperor's wardrobe, you can be sure that those pointing to his bare butt (with tacky tattoos) will be roundly ignored or shouted down.

[KCinDC]

You say Bush is an adult, but I'm not so sure. It's possible that growing up in an environment that completely insulated him from any possible negative effect of his failures has left him a perpetual adolescent. Unfortunately, things have gone beyond a wrecked car, or a pregnant girl, or a failed business -- he's reached a level where Poppy can't bail him out.

[hilzoy]

KCinDC: I meant 'he is an adult' in the literal sense, supplemented, I guess, by the thought: he is not severely retarded, insane, or one of the other things that would keep him from having the normal responsibilities of adulthood.

I write about this stuff for a living, as some of you know, and I tend not to accept the idea that if you can explain why someone thought something as a result of that person's upbringing, life experience, etc., you excuse it. I think that there are responsibilities of adulthood, and that it really takes some sort of major cognitive or psychological disability to prevent someone from having them.

One of them is: to notice such things as: that you're being bailed out of everything, and (preferably) reject the bailouts out of self-respect, or (failing that) at least to recognize them for what they are, and consider their effects, and try to overcome those that are bad. Another is: not to do things that will make other people's lives depend on your not being the sort of person you are.

I mean: it's not as though being insulated from failure actually prevents a person from noticing that he's been insulated from failure, and acting accordingly. Nor is it the case that growing up privileged prevents you from noticing that fact, and trying to take steps to undo its distortions. (Nb: I assume that most upbringings involve one or another thing to be overcome, some greater, some less. I am not singling out privileged upbringings here. Though in the case of privileged upbringings, I speak from personal experience: it is possible to think about what they involve, and to try to compensate for whatever they leave out. I am, however, a lot luckier than Bush, since 'insulating us from failure' is not something that it would ever have occurred to my parents to do.)

I think it is is true that in any organization in which supervisors oversaw his success or failure and promoted/demoted him accordingly, Bush would not have been allowed to succeed had he retained the characteristics I described. You just do not succeed as a manager if you allow the information you're working from to be systematically biassed, for instance. Or at least: not unless you're either very lucky or connected. That he has never been in such a situation is probably one reason why he still has these characteristics. But another is: because he has never gotten rid of them for some other reason (self-respect, a sense of responsibility, personal ethics.) That no one else challenges you to do something is not a reason for not challenging yourself.

[ral]

The tendency for bad news to go unreported to the boss is a basic management principle. I have worked for a variety of managers, some poor, two very good. The best managers take deliberate action to encourage the reporting of bad news because they know that the natural human reaction is to suppress it.

Many of the Bush administration's failures are at root management failures. Bad choice of subordinates, inadequate planning, unrealistic goals, shoot the messenger, these are all textbook cases. Take the recipe for Abu Ghraib:

• Disparage long-held, widely-accepted standards of conduct (the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and do not apply),
• redefine acceptable behavior in vague terms that can be interpreted to permit almost anything (torture only means pain on par with death or organ failure; prisoners should be treated "humanely"),
• understaff the prison (already a very high-stress situation),
• put extreme pressure on subordinates to get immediate results.

It is a classic example.

Why do bad managers so often rise to positions of authority? It is commonplace in business. Now we see what happens when it occurs in politics. In 2000, people at least had the excuse that they didn't know. In 2004, that excuse really didn't fly. I can only surmise that someone who gave thought to this and voted for George W. Bush anyway concluded that it didn't matter.

hilzoy: Ask yourself what else he might just not know.

This reminds me of a song Arlo Guthrie wrote about Watergate, Presidential Rag:

You said you didn't know,
that the that the cats with the bugs were there,
You'd never go along with that kind of stuff no where
But that just isn't the point man,
That's the wrong ,wrong way to go,
You didn't know about that one,
well then what else don't you know.

This is a little off topic, but I want to use it to point out a side effect of President Bush's management style: it gives him plausible deniability. It really is possible that in the event of some disaster, his poor response might be due to the fact that nobody told him some crucial point.

One last thing: in my experience, the worst managers often believe that they are the best.

[bob mcmanus]

hilzoy, you and your sources are relying on unnamed administration sources who have every reason to protect the president and the administration with leaks that confess to the lesser sins of ignorance and incompetence. You certainly have compelling evidence that these "unnamed sources" lie to the media on a regular basis.

You also have mountains of evidence that malice, graft, and political advantage are at least as plausible an explanation.

So the interesting question is why this is the interpretation you prefer.

Continued Disservice ...via Atrios

Atrios:"At some point it has to be deliberate. No one is this incompetent"

[liberal japonicus]

There is an interesting comment, by Kissinger, I think, about how, in his experience, it's not true that people don't like to be the bearer of bad news, but that people take a special delight in bearing bad news. Of course, a lot of us left leaning types have been accused during the this admin of emphasizing bad news to the exclusion of good news, so one would think this is a trait that all humans have, but the stories that have come out from this admin suggest a relentless purge of people who bring bad news (remember this, anyone?)

I think that Hilzoy prefers the interpretation of 'they are insulated/incompetent' because an interpretation that they are being mendacious would mean that this admin would say anything to anyone, so therefore, any kind of reasoned discourse becomes impossible. Also, if they were mendacious, it is difficult to imagine them figuring out that the hurricane was coming, planning for a poor response, and then using that poor response to hammer critics of the admin. I'd note that this is often a criticism raised against the 'it is all for the oil' folks.

As I've said, I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to Bob's viewpoint, but I do believe it is possible that this administration lurches from crisis to crisis always in a reactive mode rather than actually preparing for anything, and that this kind of behavior can create this kind of incompetence, especially when there are no real world correction mechanisms to kick in. A business will eventually go belly up if people of sufficient responsibility in the company engage in this kind of fantasy, but there is no correction mechanism here, I think.

[Bernard Yomtov]

If you always "trust your gut" then doesn't it follow that dissent is disloyalty? Dissent becomes not a facts-and-logic based disagreement, but a personal attack, because from your point of view external information is irrelevant to the problem at hand.

[hilzoy]

Gosh, I had no idea I was taking the charitable view. For the record: cluelessness and corruption are not mutually exclusive. In this instance (the delay in Bush seeming to be really engaged with Katrina), however, I have a hard time seeing a possible corruption angle.

I find corruption a less scary explanation, fwiw. It implies at least the possibility of future competence.

[243]

LJ: I'd note that this is often a criticism raised against the 'it is all for the oil' folks.

No way Bush et al would put oil above people!

[liberal japonicus]

Gosh, I had no idea I was taking the charitable view.

See, Hilzoy, even when you think you are being mean, you are being charitable. That's why we love you.

No way Bush et al would put oil above people!

Not meaning to tee off on you 243, but this notion of unitary reasons is really frustrating. I'm sure that there are multiple reasons behind anyone's reasons for doing something, and that's why it is necessary to separate those reasons from what is actually happening. I also assume that's why 'mindreading' is such a thought crime in discussions like these.

That's why the problem with Bob's suggestion is that logical discussion is impossible. It gets to one of those situations like the old joke about two psychologists meet each other in the hall. The first says 'Hello!', and the second, walking away, thinks 'I wonder what he meant by that?'

[243]

LJ: Not meaning to tee off on you 243, but this notion of unitary reasons is really frustrating. I'm sure that there are multiple reasons behind anyone's reasons for doing something, and that's why it is necessary to separate those reasons from what is actually happening.

Actually I pretty much agree with your multiple reasons position, but there is no doubt that some reasons are/were given higher priorities, and oil rightly or wrongly seems to be a higher priority with the admin than does, say, human rights (rendition anybody?)

That's why the problem with Bob's suggestion is that logical discussion is impossible. It gets to one of those situations like the old joke about two psychologists meet each other in the hall. The first says 'Hello!', and the second, walking away, thinks 'I wonder what he meant by that?'

Fair enough, but I'm already at the position of wondering what Bush (et al) means by pretty much anything he says, or if indeed he actually means it.

I don't think Bob's or Atrios' suggestion that the handling of Katriona was deliberate is valid; that much bad press is not something that anyone would deliberately seek. OTOH, I think it does indicate that the actual wellbeing of the general populace is not a high priority to the current administration.

[bob mcmanus]

Big Spender

Billmon analyzes the Katrina response, and ties himself in knots using his half-dozen "on the other hands". Or perhaps my Charybdian mind is no longer capable of seeing the plain and simple truth. But frankly, everyone else seems to start from the position that the rhetoric of "small government Republicanism" is a lie, and then begins the analysis and dialogue. If we don't understand even their initial premises, how are we to judge their subsequent rhetoric or actions?

To this day, the prevailing opinion is that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bremer staffed the CPA with Heritage interns because they honestly thought the interns would do an excellent to adequate job on the reconstruction. This is cited as proof of administration incompetence and idiocy. We are not here using Occam's Razor, folks.

I gave up. Over five years, in so many areas, the administration seems to achieve some stated and obvious goals. It wins reelection, keeps Congress, gets their judges, cuts taxes, passes difficult legislation. I find it simplest to look at results, assume competence, and work backwards to determine motives and goals.

PS:At a glance at Amer Her Dict, "Charybdian" appears a neologism, and hope for OED credit. Unless it sucks.

[ral]

bob m, see Frank Rich today. I think they always go all out because in the back of their minds they know it can't last, so they have to get while the getting is good.

At least, I hope that it can't last.

[Jesurgislac]

243: that much bad press is not something that anyone would deliberately seek.

But since Bush & Co know that no matter how much bad press they might get temporarily, in short order (by December 5, say, well before it matters to them electorally) it will all have been wiped out as if it had never been, why should they care?

By December 5, I would lay money, the official story will be that the whole blame can be laid on local officials, conveniently all Democrats: that the federal government responded as effectively as anyone could possibly hope for, especially given the incompetence of local and state government: that no one could possibly have predicted such a disaster and that Bush's response to it was perfectly appropriate: and anyone who says otherwise will be accused of bringing up old news or engaging in partisan warfare over a national disaster. Bush & Co are bulletproof: why should they care about bad publicity? They know it won't last.

[bad Jim]

During Nixon's administration I dismissed some of the paranoid theories that circulated then, citing Hanlon's razor. I was soon proved wrong.

Nixon was pretty bright, though, while Bush and his crew clearly are not. It's commonly observed that mediocre managers prefer less capable, less threatening subordinates, and this does seem to be the case here.

That's not to say that the administration's motives aren't also corrupt, but it's hard to see its lack of response to Katrina as anything but incompetence at the topmost levels of government.

[KCinDC]

Bob, Google shows 604 hits. Lexicographic fame eludes you.

[mg_65]

A much simpler answer is that Bushco is achieving their goals with great competence.

It's just that their goals are so unbearably horrible as to be impossible for decent people to conceive of.

[Edward]

It's just that their goals are so unbearably horrible as to be impossible for decent people to conceive of.

That does seem the most likely of all possibilities to me most of the time.

[JKO]

People do process information in different ways. Bush has obvious "output" problems with language. He may have trouble absorbing information from printed material, which could explain his preference for being briefed by assistants.

But I find alarming the fact that Bush didn't process the severity of the problem until Thursday evening even though he SAW it. He flew over New Orleans and saw miles and miles of flooded buildings, of destruction and devastation, with his own eyes. Why did he not want to be involved in taking care of this? It's an incredible failure of empathy and imagination.