“For the last year, the economic consensus, and the policy actions that have flowed from it, has been consistently behind the curve in recognizing the gravity of the problems in the housing and financial sectors and their consequences for the overall economy.”
- Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in a speech at the Brookings Institution.
No surprise here.
This entire pitiful administration – aka The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight – has been “behind the curve” on EVERYTHING since taking office:
the 9/11 attacks, proper armor for our troops in Iraq, response to Katrina.
It’s best summed up by author Tom Oliphant in his book, “UTTER INCOMPETENTS.”
“The Bush administration is unusual in many, many respects, but nowhere more so than in its trademark combination of arrogance and ineptitude. The truth is that no one had learned anything of consequence from Hurricane Andrew, no one in authority had followed any of the clear signals of approaching catastrophe in the form of Katrina, and the response to the storm’s aftermath had all the trappings of post-invasion Iraq. It was not one huge screw-up; that might have made it easier to fix.
Instead, this was a whole series of screw-ups, beginning well before and continuing well after the hurricane hit. It marked the appearance of the familiar deadly Bush sins of ineptitude, inattentiveness, hubris, cronyism, public relations spin, ideological rigidity, old-fashioned stubbornness, and know-it-all-ism at a highest-profile moment when the country is looking for results.
Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration’s response to Katrina resembles panic as much as a monumental failure”.
Oliphant provides one example of my original point about the Bush administration. When you govern with a strict adherence to an ideology, facts become mere inconveniences that can be fixed to support your policies. Additionally, no adjustments to the pre-approved policy are made after experiencing a very similar crisis (Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Katrina in 2005) years in advance. The voters, through government produced propaganda and a lazy media, never seem to notice.