Bush's Motivation: Dominance
... It's an index of the president's disconnect that last week he could utter the words "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" to FEMA Director Michael Brown. Or that he imagined he could actually suggest the administration should investigate the scandal itself. (And drag its feet on its conclusions until after the next election. We know the score now.)
In yesterday's New York Post, Dick Morris wrote that W's reputation will surely recover because rebuilding New Orleans can now become a rallying theme, a "new source of popularity. . . . A disaster like Katrina is just what a president needs to anchor his second term." The cynicism is breathtaking but also shrewd.
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? New York's only consolation this 9/11 is that we no longer feel so marginal as we recoil.