Depressing must-read WaPo expose of the miserable beginnings and middles of the Department of Homeland Security. Could be the plot for a British Fawlty-Towers style sit-com. But sadly, many people lost their lives in New Orleans because of this - incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it. Lesson? The Bush White House's predilection for making all decisions based entirely on partisan politics - the DHS was something they resisted but then didn't want the Democrats to ultimately get credit for proposing -- is a disaster for the nation. This is how they planned for war and post-war in Iraq, this is how they responded to Katrina, and this is the crew who appeal to fear in an almost demagogic way at every opportunity as an excuse for their incompetence and lawbreaking. As Judge Luttig described in his Padilla ruling, this administration is fundamentally not serious about even the most sacred decisions - depriving a US citizen of his Constitutional rights, and then saying in effect after three years, never mind. Former Bush EPA director Christie Todd Wittman was on an NPR show tonight with Alan Simpson and Robert Reich talking about this - how policy substance is almost never part of the discussion in the Bush White House, only the partisan political calculus, and how depressing it was -- how ill served the nation is by it.

Posted by Laura at December 22, 2005 12:43 AM