Faux President

Barbara O'Brien over at Mahablog has a good post up about the Bush misadministration and how from the beginning it hasn't had much substance and has been more pageant that actual governance. Here is a chunk of the New York Times piece today by Elisabeth Bumiller and David Sanger

… senior staff members insist that Mr. Bush is in good spirits, that calls from his party to inject new blood into the White House make him ever more stubborn to keep the old, and that he has become so inured to outside criticism that he increasingly tunes it out. There is no sense of crisis, they say, even over rebellious Republicans in Congress, because the White House has been in almost constant crisis since Sept. 11, 2001, and Mr. Bush has never had much regard for Congress anyway. …

… “They have a transmitter but not a listening device,” said one well-known Republican with close ties to the administration who gets calls from White House staff members. “They’ll say, ‘What are you hearing, what’s going on?’ You tell them things aren’t good on the Hill, you’ve got problems here, you’ve got problems there, or ‘I was in Detroit and boy did I get an earful.’ And their answer is, ‘Everybody’s just reading the headlines, we’ve got to get our message out better.’ There’s denial going on, and it starts at the top.”

The article and Barbara's coverage really put into perspective what we have all suspected since the beginning. We have actually spent the last six years or so with a faux president and the world has just passed us by. If you think about it all the major events of this period have pretty much just as you would expect if no one was in charge. I am convinced that 9/11 would not have happened if we had someone in charge that was actually serious about the job and paying attention. The same goes for Katrina and all the other disasters that have befallen us.

I guess Iraq is the best example of how not paying attention and not listening to the experts and not thinking things through and just pretending to be serious can create a clusterfuck of "biblical" proportions. How much different would the world be today if someone serious had been at the wheel for the last murderous six years? Two thousand three hundred and seven of America's hope for the future would still be alive and some 16,653 would not have been brutally ravaged in a sensless war with no end in sight. Don't even think about the Iraqi dead and injured or the destruction and suffering.

What the hell is going to happen over the next three years?