Floods Scour the Political Landscape, Too

If 9/11 was Bush’s Woodstock, Katrina is his Altamont — the place where his ability to unite people behind a flurry of flag-waving came to look like the hollow sham it always was. John Edwards’s mantra of Two Americas doesn’t sound so corny now that Bush’s soaring vision of democracy on the march has suddenly been laid as bare as an abandoned Superdome where the toilets are overflowing.

What’s so troubling about Bush is not that he is incompetent, as many currently charge. It’s that he is dismissive, unless programmed to be otherwise. His competence, as Justin Franks pointed out in “Bush on the Couch,” extends only to personal self-preservation — to winning. When the less fortunate are endangered, he reverts to the primal aphasia he learned at his mother’s knee. “Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” Barbara Bush commented from Houston on NPR Monday evening, adding, with a chilling matriarchal chuckle, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them.”

Wow. How’s that for one family’s values?

Read (Washington Post)