This Is 'Fully Prepared'?By Eugene Robinson

[kpete]

This Is 'Fully Prepared'?

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, March 3, 2006; Page A17

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

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The president was attending the briefings via secure video from his ranch in Crawford, Tex. After hearing what he heard, how could he have told anyone the federal government was "fully prepared" to help? And how on earth could he have said days later that no one thought the New Orleans levees might fail?

In a way, I'd worry less if I thought the president were being intentionally duplicitous. But I worry that somehow he didn't fully take in the reality of the situation, let alone its gravity. His response was to sign all the right pieces of paper and then reassure others, and perhaps himself, that everything was under control when it should have been obvious that nothing was under control.

The day after his claim about no one anticipating the failure of the levees, when the federal response was still a chaotic and ineffectual mess, Bush uttered the immortal line to his foundering FEMA director: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Did he really believe that?

A chief executive who isolates himself from bad news is one thing. A chief executive who hears bad news, in detail, and then plays it back as "heck of a job" is something else.

Is there a pattern here? President Bush surely sees, as we all see, that Iraq is in danger of falling into the abyss of sectarian civil war. He must realize that he got bad advice and tried to occupy the country with too few troops, making calamitous mistakes along the way. He surely sees the continuing violence in Afghanistan as the Taliban tries to regroup across the border in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is thought to be hiding. But he doesn't seem to really grapple with the bad news from the multi-front "war on terrorism" he has launched, preferring to acknowledge only the spread of democratic institutions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201210.html