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Scooter, voting, and fairness in Lake of the Ozarks

Because I like to think well of my countrymen, I prefer to believe that George Bush got into the White House by fooling them about his real intentions. If only they had known, if only they had understood a little more about his competence and his worldview and his intended policies, they would never have given him enough votes to slide by in 2000, and certainly not enough votes to win outright in 2004.

But many Americans didn't know. Three years ago, when I was canvassing for John Kerry in the conservative western suburbs of St Louis, one angry woman stood on the steps of her mobile home and told me that she was voting for Bush because Teresa Kerry planned to force all states to make gay marriage legal. She knew it was true because she had read it in four different places on the internets, and Teresa had enough money that she would have been able to get if off the internets if it weren't true. We did not have a productive conversation. Despite my best efforts, in that trailer park and elsewhere, Bush won the 11 electoral votes of Missouri.

But times change. Since 2004, the drip, drip, drip of information has opened many an eye to the administration's mendacity and incompetence, and a few big-picture events have broken through the media camouflage protecting Bush. The abandonment of New Orleans, increasing chaos in Iraq, and now the unfair release of a criminal from prison because he is the president's friend—each of these stories has awakened a few more oblivious voters from their slumber, and if Bush were running for office today, he would not find enough friends in Missouri to host a barbecue at any trailer park in the state.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate. But not by much. All you've got to do is consult the internets. I ran across some really interesting information about the state of Missouri voters' minds in 2007 at an unlikely website called Lake Expo Online, which exists mostly to carry ads for harmonicas and fishing boats and clothing-challenged boat parties around Lake of the Ozarks, in the deeply conservative south-central part of the state. Steve Thomas, a very good writer who describes himself as a loyal, lifelong Republican, has reached the end of his rope, and he tells the story of his disillusionment in a column titled "The way it is: Typewriters hurled over Scooter Libby fiasco." Loyal no more. "When the New Orleans levees gave way," he writes,

I didn’t want anything more to do with the Republicans. So I declared myself an Independent and have been so since. It was hard for me to walk away from a party that had been my political home since my youth.

Now Bush has commuted the jail sentence of former aide Scooter Libby.…

Libby should have gone to jail, period. He was found guilty, sentenced by a judge and his bid to put off his jail time during appeals was rejected by a panel of judges.…

Unless all men are equal before the bar of justice, no man is equal before the bar of justice. The commutation of Libby’s sentence undermines the faith of the American people in the system of justice, underscoring a growing perception that this nation is increasingly unequal, that there is not one American dream but instead many American nightmares, that we are no longer a nation where competition and compassion can coexist in a unique if sometimes uncomfortable fashion.

Instead we are faced with some ugly questions and answers.

Thomas goes on to pose some tough ones about Iraq, the military, trade policies, the working poor, and the fairness of the legal system. And he quotes Theodore White on the idealistic myth that has bound Americans together: "that all men are equal before the law and protected by it; and that no matter how the faith may be betrayed elsewhere, at one particular point—the Presidency—justice will done beyond prejudice, beyond rancor, beyond the possibility of a fix." No more. That myth is kaput.

Thomas also quotes Hunter Thompson, who considered seriously, on a similar occasion—when he heard that Gerald Ford had pardoned Richard Nixon—that he should fling his typewriter through the nearest politician's front window and "flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence then soak him down with mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high powered 'Ball Buster' cattle prod." Hunter Thompson reconsidered, and though Thomas is tempted too as he checks the heft of his old Selectric, he thinks a lot of his neighbors around Lake of the Ozarks, even the politicians, might agree with him:

Mob bosses will admire Bush’s loyalty to a closed-mouth soldier and petty criminals may well want to do better than small crime because they’ll realize that big crime pays big dividends.

Pass a bad check and go to jail. Attempt to subvert the justice system and never see the inside of a cell. Thanks a lot, George Bush.

Yet a small part of me won’t give up on our country. I think it can be brought into a better future with a healthy application of more democracy via the ballot box. I don’t know who will get my vote in the future, but I won’t surrender to the anger and cynicism that grip me right now.

Having said that, I will confess that I plan on cleaning my old Selectric. I want to rid it of the dust and grime acquired by sitting unused on a shelf. That way I can be prepared for whatever else may come because I cannot, in good conscience, hurl a dirty typewriter.

It's all about fairness. If people feel the government is cheating them, or treating other people better, they don't like it. That's as true in Missouri as it is in Massachusetts, and Bush's Republican Party is on the wrong side of the equation. It's also true in Virginia, as Tim Craig and Jennifer Agiesta write in the Washington Post today. The Old Dominion, which has not supported a Democrat for President since 1964, is now ready to do just that by a margin of 40 to 33 percent. They add: "When asked to name the worst president since 1960, 46 percent of the state's independents cited Bush. No other president was mentioned by more than 15 percent of independents," and the president's disapproval carries over to the GOP in general.

This erosion of Bushophilia in formerly red states has been going on for some time. (Last year, SurveyUSA showed that Bush had a net positive approval rating only in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Oklahoma.) That's why so many Republican incumbents lost in the 2006 congressional races, and that's why Harry Reid is beginning to think the Senate may now be ready to pass a bill to force withdrawal from Iraq. Drip, drip, drip. Perhaps they will even be ready to override a veto. Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny report in the New York Times:

In the first round of debates about the war, there was Democratic anxiety about appearing unsupportive of the troops, and Mr. Reid sought to keep a tighter rein on his colleagues who were pushing for the strongest antiwar legislation. But in the shifting environment, Democrats are newly emboldened.

Mr. Reid said he now saw ending the war as a moral duty, and even if the Senate again falls short, he said, he would turn again and again to Iraq until either the president relents or enough Republicans join Democrats to overrule Mr. Bush.

“I think that each time these people vote to continue what’s going on in Iraq it is a bad, bad move for them and a worse move for our country,” Mr. Reid said.

When the voters in Lake of the Ozarks are mad enough to hurl their typewriters, those Republican senators may decide it's time to commence some real deep soul-searching. Let's hope so. We could use a little more fairness in the US of A, and the threat of a ballot-box revolution may turn out to be even more powerful than a flying typewriter.

[Cross-posted at Scholars & Rogues]

LA-03 House Election: Katrina and Pelosi

Louisiana 3: Eastern Gulf Coast: New Iberia, Bayou Cane, Chalmette (map)
Democrat: Charlie Melancon, incumbent since 2005 (2004: won 50.2%–49.8%)
Republican: Craig Romero, state senator
Poll: Melancon 48%, Romero 24% (10/10)
Outlook: likely Democratic
Post updated: October 24
Final result (11/8): Democrat 55%, Republican 40%

Louisiana's 3rd District is bayou country, and the election here is all about Hurricane Katrina—what it destroyed, who it displaced, and what politicians did (or did not do) about it. On its way to New Orleans, Katrina roared through the district, and it left enormous devastation: demolished homes, sunken boats, and disrupted utilities. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was as disorganized here as in the city, and coordination with federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers was poor; with state agencies, it was practically nonexistent.

Charlie Melancon of Napoleonville (photo), the Democrat who represents this part of Cajun country, is incensed about the Bush administration's incompetence and broken promises. Interviewed recently by Reuters, he said, "In a regular hurricane, the Stafford Act and FEMA work pretty good. In an event like we've had here, they don't work worth a damn." Speaking to a TV reporter, he was more colloquial and even more direct: "FEMA if you're not going to help us get the hell out t'way and let us do what we need to do!" In a recent poll, his constituents approved of his fiery ways by an improbably large margin: 64% favorable, 14% unfavorable. They like what their congressman has done, but they don't like Bush's FEMA—and that disapproval rubs off on all Republicans.

Leaking, Leaking Everywhere

Leaks and lies—the standard operating procedure of the Bush administration—have been everywhere in the news this week. The levees were leaking, and George Bush knew, but he didn't do anything. Scooter Libby was leaking, and Dick Cheney knew, because he had ordered him to. Bush and Cheney lied about the reasons for invading Iraq, and both a CIA official and a British author are now leaking the truth about that. And Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld locked away hundreds of people in Guantánamo because they were all al Qaeda terrorists captured on the battlefield, but now—leaks again—we learn that most of them were not.

Katrina

Mike Brown is not the most sympathetic witness, nor the most credible. He was clearly in over his head as director of FEMA. But once he had been designated as the Katrina scapegoat by Republican panjandrums, who declined to claim executive privilege and so save him from further public humiliation before the Senate, he decided not to sacrifice himself willingly at Friday's hearings.

Brown told the senators that on the day Katrina hit New Orleans, he didn't bother to call his putative boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, because he knew it would have been a waste of time to go through another incompetent figurehead. He went right to the top, according to Spencer S. Hsu of the Washington Post:

Brown said he called and spoke at least twice on Aug. 29 with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin or Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., telling them: "New Orleans is flooding; it's the worst-case scenario." But the message apparently did not get through to Homeland Security officials.

"They should have had awareness of it, because they were receiving the same information that we were," Brown said.

"Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, 'Yes, we've confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,' then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could," Brown said. "But because this was a natural disaster, that has become the stepchild within the Department of Homeland Security."

The Category 3 storm eventually killed 1,321 people, including 1,072 in Louisiana; displaced about 2 million people; and caused more than $150 billion in damage.

The next day, Bush was expressing relief that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet," though he knew that was not true. He had appointed inexperienced cronies, starved the FEMA budget, ignored the early warnings, and acted as though the disaster were entirely the work of a malevolent God.

Scooter

Dick Cheney fulminates almost daily against those treasonous blaggards who leak classified information (such as the fact that the Bushites are conducting illegal domestic surveillance). But when it suits his political whim, he is happy to order leaking of classified information, especially if it discredits his truth-telling foes like Ambassador Joseph Wilson. But Cheney's erstwhile chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was caught, and he has now spilled the beans on Cheney to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Carol D. Leonnig of the Post reports:

In a letter written in January and released in court papers filed by Libby's defense Monday, Fitzgerald wrote that Libby testified that his "superiors" authorized him to disclose information from the National Intelligence Estimate to reporters in the summer of 2003.

The National Journal first reported on its Web site yesterday that Cheney had provided the authorization.

The intelligence estimate is a classified report prepared by intelligence officers for high-level government officials, and some parts are regularly declassified in a summary and available to the public.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride declined to comment on Cheney's role in Libby's discussions of the intelligence estimate, referring calls to Fitzgerald's office. Fitzgerald's spokesman has declined to comment on the prosecutor's investigation and filings.…

"This was not some rogue operation, but was directed at the highest levels, and specifically by Dick Cheney," [intelligence officer Larry] Johnson said. "Libby was definitely a man with a mission, but a man who was given a mission."

Cheney's hypocrisy is almost beyond belief. It is clear that he expected that his illegal activities would never see the light of day.

Iraq

Bush and Cheney paved the way for the invasion and occupation of Iraq by insisting again and again on two key lies:

• Saddam Hussein had many weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear—and was therefore an immediate threat to world peace.
• Saddam Hussein was a coconspirator with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

These lies have been discredited time and again, by Joseph Wilson among others. This week two more truth-telling leakers discredited them again. Paul Pillar, a former CIA official, "accused the Bush administration of 'cherry-picking' intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein," as Walter Pincus reports in the Post.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. "Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention."

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . . [They] felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

Pillar wrote that the prewar intelligence asserted Hussein's "weapons capacities," but he said the "broad view" within the United States and overseas "was that Saddam was being kept 'in his box' " by U.N. sanctions, and that the best way to deal with him was through "an aggressive inspections program to supplement sanctions already in place."

Pillar has published his analysis in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. British author Philippe Sands, in his book Lawless World, adds many previously unknown details about American and British preparations for the Iraq invasion. For example, in a document leaked to Sands by a British source (apparently Sir David Manning, who is currently ambassador to the US), it is reported that in late January 2003:

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were not sure there was enough evidence to convince the Security Council. Without the council's explicit authorization, their plans for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein could be difficult to defend under international law.

Bush proposed an alternative: paint a U.S. spy plane in United Nations colors and see if that didn't tempt Hussein's forces to shoot at it. In any case, he said, the war was "penciled in" for March 10 and the United States would go ahead with or without a second U.N. resolution.

Blair replied that he was "solidly with" the president.

In short, writes John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times, Blair and Bush knew that their stated reasons for invasion were probably untrue and certainly unprovable. Therefore, they wanted to goad Hussein into an attack on a "UN" airplane, an action that would have obviated any need to prove either the WMD threat or the al Qaeda connection.

Guantánamo

The prisoners held for the last four years at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to Bush and his cohorts, were all al Qaeda terrorists, and they were all captured on the battlefield. Thanks to the National Journal (via Andrew Sullivan), we now learn that neither assertion is true. In fact, writes Stuart Taylor Jr:

• A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).
• Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
• Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
• The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

Taylor quotes the lies by Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Scott McClellan, and provides more details about the prisoners' extralegal tribunal hearings and their deplorable treatment:

Last July, the Pentagon elaborated in a report of an investigation into complaints by FBI agents of abusive interrogation methods. Many of these methods -- such as shackling detainees to the floor for hours in painful positions, keeping them shivering cold during interrogations, grilling them for 16 hours nonstop, waking them up by moving them every few hours, using loud music and strobe lights -- had been officially approved as "humane," the Pentagon report explained.

Bush has also pledged that the Guantanamo detainees are treated "humanely." At the same time, he has stressed, "I know for certain ... that these are bad people" -- all of them, he has implied.

If the president believes either of these assertions, he is a fool. If he does not, choose your own word for him.

Thanks to the leaks and the leakers, we have the word. The evidence shows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that George Bush is a liar.

Racism, Intentional and Unintentional

Monday, in his powerful indictment of George Bush, Al Gore drew a parallel between FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King in the sixties and the current NSA surveillance program. He said, "Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to gross mistakes and abuses. That is part of human nature. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded."

As Josh Marshall points out, Gore highlighted an important logical connection: "Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this."

Katrina—the man-made disaster that followed the hurricane, that is—was also a good example of the racism implicit in Bush's manner of governing. While his authoritarian, incompetent administration is normally able to mask its racism with code words like "tax cuts" and "small government," Katrina ripped away the mask and revealed unmistakably the intentional oppression American blacks continue to suffer.

The origins of that racism during the centuries of slavery are well known, and 143 years after the Emancipation Proclamation the virus of racism remains endemic among many whites, especially in the South. But there was a time when it might have been nearly wiped out, a time when the ideal of equality began to be realized. The few years of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, when the federal government enforced equal treatment of blacks with military power, briefly turned the old order of the South upside down. Unfortunately, as Eric Foner details in his new book Forever Free, Reconstruction was cut short, the old plantation elite reassumed positions of power, and another century was to pass before the civil rights movement again achieved some modicum of equality.

Since the 1970s, however, even this renewed promise has been cut short. Nixon and Reagan campaigned on coded racism to gain Republican power in the South, and today Bush identifies himself subtly but completely with the history and authoritarian ethos of the ex-slaveholding class. We are, in some ways, back to the bad old days of blatant discrimination, not outright slavery but too much like the era of Jim Crow, when politicians justified racial inequality with appeals to natural law and narrow religion.

In his review of Foner's book in Salon, Andrew O'Hehir draws a parallel between the America of 1865 and the America of 2005:

Solidarity Not Charity

Molly McClure recently spent three weeks working at the Common Ground Relief Clinic in New Orleans, an all-volunteer free healthcare project that opened a week after the hurricane, and she wrote this essay to describe her experiences there. She kindly offered to let me post it on Rubicon; it's titled "Solidarity Not Charity: Racism in Katrina Relief Work." When she's not off helping people in Louisiana, Molly works to promote sexual health and racial justice in Philadelphia.

The following are some thoughts I had about the difference between solidarity and charity, specifically reflecting on the role of folks like me—white activists from out of town—in Katrina relief work.

As many people have said, the mess of Katrina was caused by a storm of racism and poverty more than wind and water. Katrina was about the racism of war that took money away from fixing the levees and other much-needed disaster preparations and went instead to the killing of poor people of color in Iraq and around the world. Katrina was about the racism of US-led capitalism that accelerates global warming, bringing bigger hurricanes and tsunamis and other “natural disasters” which always disproportionately affect the poor. Katrina was about the legacy of slavery, which meant that many white New Orleanians had the economic resources to evacuate, such as a car or other means to escape the storm and subsequent flooding, while many Black New Orleanians did not. Katrina was about the racism of FEMA and the Bush administration in their murderously slow response (you know it would have looked different in Connecticut!). And Katrina was about the racism of the police chief of Gretna, who, with the support of his predominantly white town, turned Black survivors away at gunpoint as they tried to cross the Crescent City Bridge to safety because he “didn’t want Gretna to turn into the Superdome.”

Like most of you, I’m guessing, I was outraged and heartbroken by what I saw, and I wanted to go down and see if there was some way I could support the people of the Gulf Coast in their efforts to deal with this mess. When I got there I saw and heard devastating things, stories of loss my ears are still full of, images of destruction that cut into the meat of my heart. I also saw and heard many, many inspiring things--- stories of resistance and hope, of survival and vision. I met incredible people who fed me red beans and rice on Mondays and told me about their families and their lives, who shared with me some of what New Orleans meant to them, people who through their stories helped me understand the depth and breadth of this atrocity.

The New Deal Is Still a Good Deal

During the Depression, when my uncle Paul couldn't find a job in Oklahoma City, he signed on with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He went to a camp in rural eastern Oklahoma to plant trees and lay out trails and watch for forest fires. Along with half a million other young men, he got a tent to sleep in, a work uniform, food, and $30 a month. He sent $25 of that to his younger sister, my mother, so she could attend college. Like many New Deal programs, the CCC made a big difference to millions of Americans, and our family was grateful to Franklin Roosevelt for making it happen.

I was reminded of this bit of family history by Gary Brechin's excellent article on the legacy of the New Deal in the San Francisco Chronicle (via Brad DeLong), which describes the continuing battles over what the government should do in the face of a domestic crisis. He writes:

Nothing did so much to freshen the fading memory of the New Deal as hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In their ruinous wake, liberal commentators called for similar federal activism to rebuild the South while reactionaries sought to tamp back its dreaded specter into the tomb of forgetfulness.

Though the reactionaries in the White House don't like to admit that FDR did anything right, Brechin, a scholar for the New Deal Legacy Project, describes the many ways in which Depression-era government investments have continued to pay off over the decades, including "a network of levees, roads, airports, military bases, schools, community colleges, civic auditoriums, water-delivery systems, sewers, hospitals, zoos and parks still in use today." In the San Francisco area, the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Treasure Island, and the Cow Palace are here because of the New Deal. 

Even Arnold Schwarzenegger has seen the light. In an attempt to scrub his soiled corporate image, the governor yesterday proposed state investment for California on a New Deal scale: "a $222-billion construction project to fortify freeways, schools, jails, ports and waterways."

I'm reminded of Robert Heilbroner's vain campaign, back in the nineties, to divide the federal budget into two parts, an operating budget and a capital budget. It still seems to me one of the few ways in which standard business practices could usefully be applied to government. Heilbroner cites David Alan Aschauer, whose 1990 research showed that "a dollar spent for public investment today can raise GNP between two and five times as much as a dollar spent for private investment." A separate capital budget would provide a formal way to highlight such infrastructure investment and therefore a better rationale for keeping it at a reasonable level. On the other hand, with Republican incompetents in the White House, now is not the time; they would probably use a capital budget as merely another excuse to give Halliburton wasteful contracts, or perhaps to cut taxes for the rich.

In any case, we may now hope that the pendulum is beginning to swing back from the Reagan-Bush extreme of cowboy individualism toward a more truly compassionate model of government as safety net and infrastructure provider. Of course, the real cowboys, like my uncle Paul, were fond of the New Deal. It helped them and their families when times were tough. It takes a fake cowboy like Bush to turn a natural disaster into a government catastrophe and to make compassionate a nasty word.

Next month I start receiving a Social Security check (from, yes, a still-solvent system), and our family is still grateful to FDR. The New Deal is an investment that continues to pay off.

How to Swing a Hammer

George Bush likes Louisiana. Though he neglected the state for a few days after hurricane Katrina, he's been making up for the delay ever since. He discovered that the Gulf Coast is an excellent setting for photo-ops, and he's been popping up there frequently to chuckle about Trent Lott's ex-house, to hug a few surprised black children, and to play the role of Last Man on Earth under phantasmal lighting in Jackson Square.

Bush has now made eight visits in six weeks to the Nearer Gulf, and his latest trip was designed to draw attention away from the continuing unpleasantness in the Farther Gulf (46 died today in Iraq), to show that he cares (Laura tagged along), and to demonstrate his competence (he swung a hammer once or twice). But the impression left yesterday at the Habitat for Humanity site in Covington was of a twitchy, uncomfortable, incompetent masquerader. Unlike Jimmy Carter, who is always at ease working on a Habitat site, Bush awkwardly held the wall up with one hand and grabbed the hammer with the other—halfway up the shaft, to ensure maximum inefficiency—grimacing intently at the unaccustomed activity.

After he put the hammer down, he said, "I think we’ve seen the spirits change. Local people are beginning to realize there’s hope." When he said "the spirits," did he mean the ghosts of barren New Orleans? And when he said "local people," did he mean the Louisianans who are still in Utah or those in Oklahoma?

Photo-ops like these are only effective if they don't look like photo-ops, and that means the scene looks smooth and real, and the protagonist looks like he belongs there and is in control. Nothing like that happened in Covington. As Dana Milbank points out in the Washington Post, Matt Lauer's questioning for NBC News revealed a man who is not at home in his body:

But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC's broadcast during Bush's 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he stood unprotected by the usual lectern. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an active man, but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady, he had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.

The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was "trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression," Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer -- along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling.

It's reminiscent of the time last week when Bush talked about conserving gasoline. He stuttered, shuffled, looked from side to side, and—blinking furiously—finally blurted out, "We can all pitch in by using—by being better conservers of energy." It seemed he could hardly force the words out of his mouth, and the effort was wrenching, contorting.

It's disturbing to see someone who is so disturbed, particularly someone who sees no need to change but has immense power to do ill to others. Watch his body language next time he's on TV—this is a person who is not comfortable in his own skin. On this visit to Louisiana, he said, "Out of this rubble is going to come some good. Out of this devastation will come a new city." His awkward pauses, pursed lips, and nervous smiles did not inspire confidence. When Bush picks up a hammer, he is far more likely to knock something down than build something up.

A Flood of Money

The US government smells as putrid as a flooded New Orleans street on a hot day. The Bush cronies are floating to the surface, and some of them—like David Safavian, OMB procurement chief at the White House—are now being hauled away in handcuffs. As Paul Krugman says, "Something is rotten in the state of the U.S. government."

It's so bad that Frank Rich yearns for the days of Warren Harding (and Rich may not even have tongue in cheek). For those of you who remember your American history, Harding was known (until recently) as the worst American president in history. He was detached from the business of government; his speeches were full of empty platitudes; and his friends became very rich as a result of their positions in the government. The system of widespread fraud and bribes became known as the Teapot Dome scandal, and the Interior Secretary and the Veterans Bureau chief went to prison, while two other officials committed suicide.

The White House website (Bush's webmaster apparently has no sense of irony) quotes a description of Harding's speaking style as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea." And in 1923, when he finally realized that his administration was crumbling in scandal, Harding complained, "I have no trouble with my enemies, but my damn friends, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights."

The parallels are astonishingly exact: opaque language, detached work style, simplistic belief in business, and greedy friends. No extramarital affairs for Bush, it's true, and his obsessive exercise will probably protect him against a fatal heart attack. But Harding's scandals don't hold a candle to Bush's. Contracts typically go to friends and political supporters, with little supervision or auditing. Even in the wake of Katrina, as Eric Lipton and Ron Nixon report in the New York Times:

More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse.

Already, questions have been raised about the political connections of two major contractors - the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton - that have been represented by the lobbyist Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former leader of FEMA.

Allbaugh, of course, was the manager who hired and promoted "heck of a job" Mike Brown to his lethal eminence. Halliburton, of course, is the company from which weak-kneed ex-CEO Dick Cheney is still getting millions in deferred compensation. And, as Krugman points out, "all the scandals now surfacing are linked." Nearly every one of these felons-in-waiting—from Karl Rove to Tom DeLay to Grover Norquist—is closely linked to every other one through indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It's a friendly, tight bad-old-boy network.

And they all work for Bush, who is unlike Harding in one other important way. He's not worried enough to walk the floor nights. If the fellows are loyal, he doesn't care if they're felons. Heck of a job, Bushie!

Update, 12/30: In a year-end roundup, Krugman revisits the rottenness and discovers that few people are still fooled. It's time to begin impeachment proceedings, say I.

How to Destroy an Organization

Every successful governmental organization has its own particular kind of glue that holds it together, the ethos that makes it successful. Before Bush and Cheney took office, the US Army's glue was a sense of mission to protect the country from foreign enemies—and the inviolate hierarchy of the chain of command. The Federal Drug Administration's glue was a sense of mission to protect citizens' health by approving  drugs rapidly but carefully—and a reverence for objective truth confirmed by scientific peer review. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's glue was a sense of mission to react quickly and effectively to disasters—and thorough planning complemented by rapid improvisation. In each case, career officials carried the organization's culture forward and indoctrinated new employees with its cultural values.

All of these organizations are now falling apart, because George Bush and his cronies have installed people in management positions who are insensitive to the particular glue, usually because they have little experience in the kind of work the organization does—and no interest in maintaining an organizational ethos. They are often incompetent and slow to learn what they do not know. 

We know much more now than we did a month ago about the ways in which Bush stripped FEMA of money, expertise, and mission. Under James Witt, FEMA had become a responsive, efficient agency, and Clinton had given it cabinet status. Bush appointed Joe Allbaugh, his former campaign manager, to run it; and when Allbaugh cashed in to become a lobbyist, his college buddy the infamous Mike Brown sat in the top chair. There was less planning, less coordination with local and state agencies, and less expertise. Many experienced employees left the agency. The glue of a shared mission was no longer there, and the Katrina disaster was the result. Bush then threw Brown to the wolves; but FEMA remains weak, disorganized, and riddled with political appointees.

Disheartened career employees have also been leaving the FDA, as the mission has changed from protecting citizens' health to protecting drug companies' profits. Scientific results and a process of peer review are no longer paramount. Vioxx was approved, though studies indicated it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. And Plan B, the morning-after pill used successfully for years in Europe, has not been made available without a prescription despite the recommendation of an expert advisory panel. In the latest instance of chaos, FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford resigned abruptly on Friday. Bush has undercut the historical mission of the agency to allow his pharmaceutical friends to make more money, and public health suffers. The results of peer review are overturned by political appointees, for political reasons. Science is second to cronyism.

The most disturbing instance of organizational destruction, however, is that of the military, especially the US Army. As soldiers have begun to understand that the Iraq War was based on a tissue of lies, and that fighting in Iraq does not protect the US from enemies, they have become demoralized and frustrated. Abu Ghraib was just the beginning. Eric Schmitt reports in the New York Times that "The Army has opened more than 400 inquiries into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and punished 230 enlisted soldiers and officers."

The latest credible allegations of detainee torture and abuse—more evidence of an organization coming unglued—are from an Army captain and two sergeants, and they are corroborated by a report from Human Rights Watch. In Time, Adam Zagorin writes:

The new allegations center around systematic abuse of Iraqi detainees by men of the 82nd Airborne at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base located near Fallujah, the scene of a major uprising against the U.S. occupation in April 2004, according to sources familiar with the report and accounts given by the Captain, who is in his mid-20s, to Senate staff. Much of the abuse allegedly occurred in 2003 and 2004, before and during the period the Army was conducting an internal investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but prior to when the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public. Other alleged abuses described in the Human Rights report occurred at Camp Tiger, near Iraq's border with Syria, and previously in Afghanistan. In addition, the report details what the Captain says was his unsuccessful effort over 17 months to get the attention of military superiors. Ultimately he approached the Republican senators.

The Human Rights Watch report—as well as accounts given to Senate staff—describe officers as aware of the abuse but routinely ignoring or covering it up, amid chronic confusion over U.S. military detention policies and whether or not the Geneva Convention applied.

No one in the US Army dares to do anything significant without the approval of a superior. That's what the chain of command means. A private does what the sergeant says, the sergeant checks with the captain, the captain with the colonel, the colonel with the general, and the general with the secretary of defense and the president. Until Bush and Donald Rumsfeld approved of torture and passed the word down the line—if only by a wink and a nod—Private Lindie England would not have lifted a finger.

The US Army is being destroyed from within by Bush and Rumsfeld because they do not understand the sense of duty and honor on which the organization has been built. They do not understand the idea that military men have always been proud of exemplifying an ideal of humane democracy, even as they fought bloody wars to protect their countrymen. Bush and Rumsfeld misused the traditional chain of command to undercut deeply held military traditions.

It is not surprising that both new enlistments and reenlistments are falling precipitously. The glue is gone, and only the shame is left.

Reaping the Whirlwind

The earth is getting warmer, rapidly. It's mainly due to human activity, especially increased CO₂ and other greenhouse gases; and among other undesirable consequences it's causing stronger, more dangerous hurricanes. Those Houston SUVs stuck in traffic as they try to flee Hurricane Rita are a perfect image of cause and effect. Live in a distant suburb, drive your SUV, emit large quantities of CO₂, and watch the category 4 and 5 hurricanes swoop down on you. It's the American way. And scientists' worst fears are coming true.

Last year, according to James Hansen of NASA:

The average temperature at Earth's surface around the world was 0.48 degrees Celsius or 0.86 Fahrenheit above the average temperature from 1951 to 1980.… There has been a strong warming trend over the past 30 years.

With Hurricane Rita approaching the Texas coast at category 4 winds of 140 miles per hour—and the potential for 15 inches of rain and storm surges of 15 to 20 feet—the enormously destructive Katrina is looking less like an anomaly. We can now expect more strong storms, and cities like New Orleans and Galveston—in fact, large swathes of the Gulf of Mexico coastline—may become uninhabitable. The warm surface waters of the gulf are feeding Rita and intensifying its cyclonic forces, just as they did to Katrina.

In Science, John Travis reports one scientist's surprise  at the earlier hurricane:

Timothy Olander, a tropical cyclone researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recalls waking up the next morning [Sunday, August 28] to see that Katrina's central air pressure had dropped from about 960 millibars to below 905 millibars. The storm was now a category 5 hurricane with winds topping 175 mph. "I thought, 'Holy cow. That's an amazing development.' You don't see that rapid intensification very often," he says. Katrina "became one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico-Caribbean region." Two factors, says Olander's colleague James Kossin, fueled Katrina's growth: "phenomenally warm" waters in the gulf and a lack of strong, high-altitude winds that could have dispersed the storm's energy.

The effects have been well documented, and Science has made available several research reports, reviews, and articles on the subject. The bottom line is that there is no difference of opinion among scientists that significant climate change is taking place, that human activity is the leading cause, and that many dangerous effects have already begun to occur. The only significant questions remaining have to do with the speed and magnitude of the changes.

For instance, a study by P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H.-R. Chang found a large increase in the "number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5" in the last 35 years, as this chart shows (click on it for a larger version). Furthermore, the increase in powerful storms is strongly correlated with the increase in sea surface temperature, which rose on average 0.5°C between 1970 and 2004. The number of storms overall, however, did not increase, nor did the highest winds of those storms that were most powerful. Nevertheless, more strong storms will certainly mean more disasters like Katrina.

Global warming now has such momentum that even a large decrease in greenhouse gas emissions—by, for example, barring all SUVs and similarly polluting vehicles—would not reverse the trend, though it would slow it. Another recent Science report posits several different models of global warming, and the authors conclude that even the most optimistic assumptions predict an increase in surface temperature of 1.1°C and a rise in sea level of of 13 cm by 2100. The least optimistic predict an increase of 3.5°C and a rise of 30 cm. Those changes may not seem significant, but the earth's environment is a finely balanced system—and small causes result in large effects, including extensive seacoast flooding, loss of agricultural land, and species extermination.

The effects also include more powerful hurricanes, like Katrina and Rita. As Jeremy Rifkin writes in the Guardian:

Katrina and Rita, then, are not just bad luck, nature's occasional surprises thrust on unsuspecting humanity. Make no mistake about it. We Americans created these monster storms. We've known about the potentially devastating impact of global warming for nearly a generation. Yet we turned up the throttle, as if to say: "We just don't give a damn."…

How do we explain to our children that Americans represent less than 5% of the population of the world but devour more than a quarter of the fossil-fuel energy produced each year? How do we say to the grieving relatives of the victims of the hurricane that we were too selfish to allow even a modest five-cent tax increase on a gallon of petrol in order to encourage energy conservation? And when our neighbours in Europe and around the world ask why the American public was so unwilling to make global warming a priority by signing up to the Kyoto treaty on climate change, what do we tell them?

The prophet Hosea has the answer to Rifkin's questions, and it's not comforting: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."