The only problem with this op-ed is that it isn't in a conservative newspaper. How proud are you today for voting for this incompetent fuck?

As one friend hopes... " I think rage and disgust will outweigh party lines. This can't be spun."

A Failure of Leadership
New York Times

By BOB HERBERT
Published: September 5, 2005

"Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"

Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked
White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's
failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up
like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on
television screens across the U.S. and around the world.

The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of
George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of
thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in
agony was there for all the world to see.

Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with
ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors
and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to
breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure,
slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless
doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.

The president didn't seem to notice.

Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up
in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked
sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces.

Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing
distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of
the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem
to notice.

Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television,
and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're
more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their
mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.

Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases
die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days
the president of the United States didn't seem to notice.

He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white
and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the
George W. Bush administration, still invisible.

After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from
conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the
president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of
criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something
tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this
administration.)

Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that
he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were
stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at
one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and
mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be
replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the
porch."

Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a
president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as
the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous
incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the
president and his administration.

And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage
continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the
prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when
effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters
of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives
of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is
being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome
responsibilities.

Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has
been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize
the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But
this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is
so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that
the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep,
deep trouble.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com