The Incompetent Chimp to the rescue: How will our Screw-Up President screw up this time?

Bush made a hash of 9/11 by responding with the Iraq War, and now we sit, in a quagmire of his making. How will he screw up Katrina reconstruction? No doubt there'll be other things besides no-bid contracts with Halliburton, and suspending minimum wage rules for reconstruction firms. But what else? Expect something. This administration hasn't touched anything yet that it hasn't managed to screw up. Frank Rich really nails W to a high mast in today's NY Times:

Message: I Care About the Black Folks:

Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.

Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. (Read the whole condemnation here).

The NY Times has two conservative columnists in its line-up, the sometimes amusing but often bizarrely off-base David Brooks, and the still-finding-his-feet John Tierney, but its leftwing columnists, from Herbert to Dowd (well, she's anti-Prez anyway, whoever he is -- be interesting what she does with Hillary), can really lay it on the line, and this is one of Rich's best. In the end, something like Katrina tests a president's character, and Bush has come up close to zero in that department. You can't spin character: you either have it or you don't.

Still, wouldn't it be amazing if Bush could somehow rise to this occasion, and pull the country together in a genuine effort to eradicate poverty in the Gulf and everywhere else in our nation? Something that Bill Clinton would have done, for example. God, I wish Bush could, but you and I know, he can't. He just doesn't have it in him, and neither do the mediocrities he surrounds himself with.

It's unfortunate that we got landed with two of the greatest challenges in our nation's history -- 9/11 and Katrina -- at a time when we voted for an incompetent chimp to lead us. In the end, we have only ourselves to blame. You can't blame Michael Brown alone for screwing up FEMA -- George Bush gave him the job. You can't blame Bush for screwing up 9/11 and Katrina either -- we gave him the job.