David Brooks: Aviator and Avatar

I watched The Aviator last night. The dramatic high point of the movie occurs when Howard Hughes, already living in seclusion as a naked wretch paralyzed by his phobias and other demons, is summoned to oppear before a Congressional committee. Juan Tripe, the head of Pan American Airways, and his flunky, Senator Brewster, want to destroy Hughes so that Pan Am can be guaranteed a monopoly on overseas air travel. Hughes, revived by the crisis, pulls himself together with a little help from Ava Gardner and routs his enemies with a brilliant performance before the committee.

Similarly, the trajedy of New Orleans managed to wake David Brooks into the real world long enough to condemn the incompetence. Like Hughes awakening, it was brief. In today's New York Times column he can no longer remember the gross incompetence and venality that produced the disaster. The things that went wrong went wrong because government is inherently incompetent. His demented ideological blinders conveniently permit him to forget that history provides us with plenty of examples of competent government response as well as incompetent - for example, Hoover's energetic response to the great flood of 1927.

This was not a failure of our system of government, Mr. Brooks, this was a failure of leadership. In this week's Newsweek, Evan Thomas lays out some particulars in his story of How Bush Blew It. An excerpt:
It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

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