A FAILED CEO….I’ll confess that even I’m getting a little weary of the relentless post-Katrina fault finding, much of which has now deteriorated into nitpicking over even the minor acts of disarray that are inevitable following a disaster like Katrina. But every time I start thinking we should ease up, the White House delivers yet another outrage:
At a news conference, [Nancy] Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”
She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.
“He said ‘Why would I do that?’” Pelosi said.
“‘I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?’”
I must say that the Katrina response does help me better understand the situation in Iraq. The best bet is that the president doesn’t actually know what’s happening there, is cocooned from reality, has no one in his high-level staff able to tell him what’s actually happening, and has created a culture of denial and loyalty that makes fixing mistakes or holding people accountable all but impossible.
I wish the few remaining adults in the Republican leadership understood this: Bush is indeed a CEO president, but he’s a bad CEO. It’s time for the board of directors to do something.
Alternatively, there’s Marshall Wittman’s take: “We have a man-child as President of the United States.”
UPDATE: David Ignatius has similar thoughts. He also notes that the Bush/Rove team is spectacularly good at managing politics, which makes their deficiencies in managing the real world all the more apparent.
