Why George Can't Govern

I posted a while back about the authoritarianism of the Bush administration. Josh Marshall puts another piece into the puzzle that is our leadership when he equates authoritarianism to incompetence. I had seen both but had not made the connection. I think Marshall is right on.

Look at it this way: you have an individual who is elevated to a position of responsibility when he has had very little success with responsibility to that point in time. He doesn't want to muck up this at bat so he surrounds himself with solid, dependable people who he can tap when his expertise runs thin - which, to give him credit, is an unusually self-aware thing to do.

Yet, these "solid, dependable people" all have their own ambitions and desires and agendas and prove to be pretty darn good at getting what they want. The individual may or may not be aware of this but it is darn certain that he is too incompetent to do anything about it.

Because the incompetent does not understand the rules, he reveals himself as powerless to stop abuses. The manipulators are without power because of the rules and must abuse them in order to get what they want. Together, the insecurity of incompetency and the lust for power combine to run our rules through the grinder and pad the nest of this group.

The only way that the public can allow this to happen is to buy - hook, line, and sinker - that the administration is doing this for our own good. What is truly pathetic and scary is that there is still about 39% of them out there that still do.