What Has Bush Done to the Government?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
The last two times the Pew Research Center asked people to describe President Bush in a single word, chief among the overwhelmingly negative responses was the word "incompetent."
What makes that particularly fascinating is that it's a realization that the public has reached pretty much on its own.
While there's certainly been spirited debate and extensive news coverage about the ideological merit (or lack thereof) of Bush's policies pretty much across the board, there's also a critical underlying issue: Whether those policies are being competently carried out by the people Bush has put in charge of the agencies, departments and branches of the armed forces responsible for their execution.
It's certainly hard to find anyone, even among Bush's most ardent supporters, who would argue that the war in Iraq has been carried out intelligently. As one example, there is ample evidence that many warnings from career bureaucrats about post-war challenges were blithely ignored by their political bosses.
Just this past week, stories about the unregulated conduct by employees of private security firms, a massive corruption investigation involving the Pentagon's war-zone procurement system, and yet another sudden ballooning of war costs make it clear that the competence issue in Iraq is anything but ancient history.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency's tragically botched response to the catastrophe in New Orleans in 2005 briefly turned director Michael " heck of a job, Brownie" Brown into a poster-boy for incompetence, but didn't lead to any sort of rigorous administration-wide assessment.
(Continued here.)
Special to washingtonpost.com
The last two times the Pew Research Center asked people to describe President Bush in a single word, chief among the overwhelmingly negative responses was the word "incompetent."
What makes that particularly fascinating is that it's a realization that the public has reached pretty much on its own.
While there's certainly been spirited debate and extensive news coverage about the ideological merit (or lack thereof) of Bush's policies pretty much across the board, there's also a critical underlying issue: Whether those policies are being competently carried out by the people Bush has put in charge of the agencies, departments and branches of the armed forces responsible for their execution.
It's certainly hard to find anyone, even among Bush's most ardent supporters, who would argue that the war in Iraq has been carried out intelligently. As one example, there is ample evidence that many warnings from career bureaucrats about post-war challenges were blithely ignored by their political bosses.
Just this past week, stories about the unregulated conduct by employees of private security firms, a massive corruption investigation involving the Pentagon's war-zone procurement system, and yet another sudden ballooning of war costs make it clear that the competence issue in Iraq is anything but ancient history.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency's tragically botched response to the catastrophe in New Orleans in 2005 briefly turned director Michael " heck of a job, Brownie" Brown into a poster-boy for incompetence, but didn't lead to any sort of rigorous administration-wide assessment.
(Continued here.)
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