Glad To Not Be An Apologist

I’m not one, but it’s a good time to be a Democrat. It’s a good time to not have to defend the Bush Administration, a burden that despite my lack of identification with the Democratic party, I am happy to be free of carrying.

I know that I wouldn’t want to be the one to have to tell people in Louisiana and Mississippi why it is that the President said “Well, no one had any idea that the levees in New Orleans would break after the hurricane,” and then reconcile that with a video of a briefing three days before Katrina made landfall, in which the President being told that the levees could fail. (You can see the video itself here.)

And Michael Brown, the Administration’s sacrificial lamb on the altar of incompetence, now looks a good deal better than he used to. The former head of FEMA, obviously ousted in the face of the biggest global embarrassment to our national pride since the fall of Saigon, expresses concerns about exactly what happened and demonstrates a pained awareness that he would be able to do nothing to stop the disaster after the hurricane. Those sentiments were echoed by Brown’s immediate boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Chertoff’s boss, however, said and did nothing in response to these concerns.

Maybe there was nothing he could have done. But if I had been in W’s shoes, I would damn well have been on the phone with Chertoff, asking what else he needed. W, however, was in Crawford, Texas, chopping wood or hunting quail or whatever he does down there on his ranch.

But then again, I’d take on the job of explaining away the President’s laissez-faire attitude about Hurricane Katrina any day before having to explain the imminent “clarification” (read: retraction) of Attorney General Gonzales’ testimony about domestic wiretapping. “Umm, yeah. See, when he testified before Congress, Gonzales was talking about some of the wiretaps. You all never asked him about those other wiretaps over here, see.”

As I’ve written before, I think the Administration was in the right about approving the sale of port management contracts to Dubai Ports World — although that looks like it’s going to be derailed now in spite of the complete absence of evidence that there is any security concern whatsoever. The recent revelation that Dubai Ports World participates in a boycott of Israeli ships may be the kiss of death for them. But the issue seems not to be that the administration made the right call, but rather that the White House just did what it wanted without bothering to consult with anyone, regardless of what the law says had to be done.

Way back in 1992, I was very alarmed at the rhetoric coming from the pint-sized populist Ross Perot, who managed to tap in to Americans’ frustration with the slow, inefficient, and often contradictory results of the American political process. He promised to run the government like he ran his corporations and demonstrated contempt for the inefficient political process. Observing his deliberate ignorance of the fact that the very inefficiency he condemned was intended as a protection of liberty. My fear was that if this strange, egoistical man somehow were to be elected President, he would grow frustrated with the fact that the President is not the CEO of the country and wind up proclaiming himself King Ross I.

Well, it’s a good thing for Bush the Younger that he’s not the CEO of the country. Any CEO who suffered this many public screw-ups, of this magnitude, in such short succession to one another, would be subject to a revolt by stockholders forcing his resignation. But at this point, I have to speculate that Bush is fantasizing more than a little bit about what being King George II would be like. (The British do not provide a particularly good namesake, in my opinion.)

Fears of a monarchy or the establishment of a dictatorial government here in the States are somewhat hysterical, and except for when the very lives of my wife and I are threatened, I try hard to not allow myself to become hysterical. But the point remains — we have a government with an internal system of checks and balances for a reason. We have a government that apportions power amongst many different people for a reason. And this Administration, much like the Perot Administration I once feared, has nothing but contempt for that concept, and has demonstrated time and again its willingness to short-circuit those safeguards.

Ever since at least the Clinton Bush (the Elder) Reagan Nixon Johnson Administration, it’s been no surprise to anyone that the White House is filled with liars. And as I wrote in a different context a while ago, the fish starts rotting from the head.