Last week, the National Review’s Rich Lowry addressed an issue that it took him several years to notice: the Bush administration’s breathtaking incompetence.
“[Bush] has made a few key bad decisions about policy and personnel, compounded them by not reacting quickly enough when things go wrong, and failed to create a sense of accountability in his government,” Lowry wrote. He added, “Once inside the charmed Bush circle, people tend to stay there and rise to the level of their incompetence.”
Apparently, this “I-word” is finally making the rounds. Bob Novak noted it in his column today:
The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is “incompetent.” … The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI’s misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. “We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,” one House leader told me. “How can we claim that anymore?” [...]
The answer that is not entertained by the president’s most severe GOP critics, even when not speaking for quotation, is that this is just the governing style of George W. Bush and will not change while he is in the Oval Office.
The Bush administration, blinded by ideology and unmoved by facts, has a problem with incompetence? You don’t say.
