Herbert can take no more

January 26, 2006

I know I’m not supposed to link to columns behind the NYT’s annoying pay wall, but I feel compelled to note Bob Herbert’s condemnation of President Bush, which ran today.

His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that’s the real problem. That’s where you’ll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence.

Fantasy may be in fashion. Reality may have been shoved into the shadows on Mr. Bush’s watch. But the plain truth is that he is the worst president in memory, and one of the worst of all time. Many thousands of people — men, women and children — have died unnecessarily (and thousands more are suffering) because of his misguided and mishandled policies.

I’ve seen plenty of hard-hitting columns, but this strikes me as about the most forceful denunciation of the president in a major daily that I’ve seen.

Update: Several emailers and commenters remind me that the WaPo’s Harold Meyerson was nearly as aggressive yesterday.

Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president’s defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things — particularly when most of them were the president’s own initiatives. […]

How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn’t explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed, in understanding why Bush entrusted his new drug entitlement to a financial mainstay of modern Republicanism. To sloth, in understanding why Incurious George has repeatedly ignored the work of experts whose advice runs counter to his desires.

OK, they’re both good. I still think Bob Herbert went a little further, but the more of these columns that run in the major dailies, the better.

Myerson had a nice one in the WaPo the other day.

  • In what context does he refer to the thousands? Iraq? Katrina? Poverty in general? No context at all? Any other reason for the condemnation? I really hate not being able to read NYT columns anymore.

  • In what context does he refer to the thousands? Iraq? Katrina? Poverty in general?

    Yeah, sorry. The context was most of the above — primarily Katrina and Iraq.

  • Fifty million Americans put their hands on their ears and say “LALALALAL I CAN’T HEAR YOU LALALAL BLOWJOB LALALA BABY JESUS LALALALA ISLAMOFACISM LALALALA.

    Kinda makes you proud to be an American….

  • ET: Did all the left leaning or moderate op-ed writers get together or what.

    What I noticed is that (from what I can see of Herbert’s article) these are both about Bush’s incompetence. Not the Republicans in general, oh no. Just get rid of that Bush (who’s a lame duck and not standing for re-election anyway) and all will be well. Doesn’t have a thing to do with Radical Right Republicans’ ideology of starving the beast and letting their buddies loot the public treasury (for as long as there IS a public treasury, anyway)..

    I suspect it’s damage control, more than anything else.

  • Comment 5 is pretty much close to the truth.

    If you can’t be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with others? This link is a very interesting study on what the difference is between competence and incompetence.

    http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

    Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

    Why? They have NO DOUBTS about anything they do. Any failing or personality flaw? Doesn’t exist. Wasn’t there. Didn’t happen. It was all God/Jehovah/Jeebus/Sweet Zombie Jeebus/Allah’s will when it goes wrong, but when it’s right, it’s all my idea. Never ask what went wrong. All plans they do work and Murphy’s Law doesn’t exist because they don’t believe it.

    Competent folks always have doubts and it drives them to learn or do things to make it better or they realize their mistakes and try to correct them.

    To have doubts and ask questions means that you have some curiosity and intelligence. Having neither is a pretty good sign you’re a close minded fool who have all the answers.

    Look at us Liberal types. We never give a single definate answer. Our answers are filled with buts, maybes and possibilities but if you ask a Con, the answer’s tone implies certainty and the answer itself is definate. But what a lot of people don’t ask is what in hell makes them so certain? Particularily if they aren’t well read (ie: read books outside their ideological boundaries) or have any sort of intellectual curiosity?

  • One can draw a theory from this, (and a whole lot of other evidence) that we may never see another competent President for a long, long time. We have the shrill religious right and the corporate-GOP-wing-controlled right-wing media to thank for that. I’m hard up to find anything on the right contributing to this, except an unwillingness of anyone competent (ie Gore) to run, and thereby expose themselves to the kind of bile the former parties spew forth in their direction. The corporates don’t want an effective President, they only want a ruiner, someone who makes government “small enough to drown in a bathtub” so they won’t have to pay taxes, and the religious right will guarantee that anyone that anyone potentially palatable to the majority of the country will still suffer greatly for their courage in attempting to run for the office.

    Maybe I’m being paranoid. But then again I had a sense that Bush would be this bad, and I told myself I must have been wrong, it could never get this bad. We won’t really be mired in an Orwellian state of perpetual war with our rulers flogging fear. We won’t be mired in a perpetual state of unending war with an amorphous enemy. We won’t ever have to sacrifice our core values for some sense of safety. We won’t see our freedoms being consistently eroded. Social security and retirement security will always be there. The economy took a dive on a regular basis, but it always rebounded before. (Dunno on that one, it seems to be picking up again anyway, although the shape of the rebound doesn’t look that great yet.)

    But it did get that bad.

  • When he wants to, Bob Herbert can work up a good head of steam all right. I still remember years and years ago when he was at the NY Daily News he called Ed Meese “a boil on the buttocks of America.”

  • It’s important to remember here that the Regal Moron has walking disaster all his life. His presidency continues a lifelong pattern.

    Andover, Yale and Harvard – on the mentality and curiosity of a three-year-old (and Daddy’s bucks and connections). Oil companies and a major league baseball team – all thrashed. Texas governor on a campaign to improve education (it’s become a disaster there). A stolen presidency during five years of which he’s ruined more programs and built up a greater debt (to the Chinese) than all his predecessor combined! God knows what’ll he’ll “accomplish” with his next three years and submissive Congress and Court.

    His private life is just as unfortunate as his public one. A weak, fragile personality relying on four mothering woman for daily adulation (Barbara, Laura, Condi, Karen). Daughters who Limbaugh and company would trash justifyably if they were daughters of Carter and Clinton. Alcohol and cocaine addiction without ever going to rehab. Relying on a self-proclaimed born-again brainless form of fundamentalism and a mindless but rigorous daily regimen of bike riding to keep him (apparently) off booze and drugs. Unable to read (except “My Pet Goat” which he read while the WTC was being destroyed). Unable to keep from falling off the couch while watching TV. Truly a Regal Moron.

  • then again I had a sense that Bush would be this bad

    I have to bring it up – anyone remember Election Night 2000 – CNN had called Pennsylvania and Florida for Gore, and they went to that awful interview with George HW and Babs in Houston where they were pretty confident of Florida flipping because of stuff that Jeb told them? At the time it seemed pretty clear at that moment that Gore would win but I got a chill after watching Geo HW and Babs and I remember thinking something along the lines of “what if this is a mirage and Bush does win and everything changes and goes to shit and we’lll look back on this moment as one big tease of any era that we thought would continue but instead will be gone forever?” – or something to that effect… And every once in awhile I think back to that moment and think about the “what if’s…”.

    and the funny thing is – I’ve never seen that Geo HW and Babs interview again and it’s almost never referred to. It’s almost as if it never existed and it’s that moment itself that is the mirage – back when we still had hope.

  • I think it’s a case of “enough is enough”, or the Anti-Midas, etc. 5 years of failure starts to amount to real failure after a while, and, despite the spin produced on each and every turd to turn it into a blossom (thanks Karl) people are beginning to see a pattern, and that pattern is incompetence (skipping gleefully along hand in hand with arrogance, disdain, righteousness and hypocrisy). It was clear to anyone who looked (see #10 above) that Bush’s path to where he is now was littered with failures, and for anyone to have thought that the pattern would not continue, was either high on crystal meth, or somehow thinking that all the puppet masters and gladhandlers would manage his presidency for him. But when you have an incompetent being led around by power hungry self serving sychophants, you are pretty much doomed to a massive groupthink of stupidity – policies that may look good on the service, make nice soundbites, but are just awful when implemented well, and disastrous when implemented poorly. So here we are, with Bush the shining of example of what all he stands above in the administration – he himself a crony, so he hires them, knowing all he can get from them is loyalty. He, an incompetent fool at the top appointing the same types below. This is a recipe for failure. The arrogance on top of it makes it all the worse, since these close-minded, self-righteous blowhards act as if they are doing what is best for other people, even while they are doing what is best for the little slice of people who control the various power levers in this country. Its truly stunning that it has gone on this long already, and the only reason I can see that it has is that the spin is pushed from the top, the money pushed below, and the followers by the spin so they can keep the money. If youve ever watched the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, or BBC news, or anything of the sorts on TV, then watched an hour of the mainstream stuff, you can see what is wrong and why this wretched administratioin has not been toppled in a massive revolution. Its called propaganda, plain and simple, a willful defiance of reality, and perhaps now, people are finally waking up to the fact that the veneer is paper thin, and if you poke enough holes in it, you can eventually clearly see what lies beneath – a vacuous bunch of people who know nothing of policy, but who simply enjoy, power, money and politics. If you could impeach a president for the accumulation of failures, this one would already be gone. How much of America as we know it will have to be destroyed by this ongoing trainwreck before the rest of the country wakes up?

  • You know, once that kid pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, everything started to look different….

  • Oops.

    I’m hard up to find anything on the right contributing to this, except an unwillingness of anyone competent (ie Gore) to run, and thereby expose themselves to the kind of bile the former parties spew forth in their direction.

    I meant to say I’m hard up to think of anyone on the LEFT contributing to this. We’ve got our shrills but I tend to have an easier time ignoring them.

  • Hey, andy, # 11, you should check out Moore’s book, Stupid White Men. In the first or second chapter he describes in chilling detail this exact interview you reference.

  • cool I’m glad someone remembers it – I haven’t read any of Michael Moore’s books yet – maybe I should…

  • Feeble George the Second isn’t competent enought to have created a national disaster of this magnitiude on his own. Hidden powerful friends are poised to protect their controlling interest in our government.
    The corporate shadow government that pulls the real levers of power has many more tricks and surprises in store for us. Stay tuned to your cable news networks and watch the upcoming the propaganda extravaganza to prevent real governmental reform. They paid good money for this government and they won’t let it go without a fight.

  • To Paul:

    And refuses to see that loyalty is the exclusive province of royalty! We allow our monarchs to consort with sychophants and hangers-on because, let’s face it, they’re not usually in a position to harm anyone.

    But a world leader who insulates himself with yes-men is a freaking ticking time-bomb. A wise leader surrounds himself with a coterie of nitpickers, naysayers, and devil’s advocates; the absolute best and brightest thinkers and wielders-of-facts available. He foresees the unforeseeable, prepares for the worst and then expects the best. And above all, he reads, reads, reads — especially the criticisms of others. Heck, even my 7 year old daughter understands the principle of garbage-in, garbage-out…

    Alison WS

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