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Bush calls Homeland Security a "Titanic struggle"

[PLEASE NOTE: This story is from June 7, 2002.]

(Nicholas M. Horrock, UPI, 6/7/2002)
President George W. Bush chose an unfortunate word in announcing his new Homeland Security Department Thursday, noting that the U.S. is leading the world in a "titanic" struggle against terror, which caused the cynics among us who wondered whether Bush's massive government reorganization was more akin to a re-arrangement of the chairs on the deck of that doomed vessel. . . . Too cynical? Perhaps. But in the concept for the behemoth of a government agency that Bush has designed, and in the almost frantic way it was planned and announced, one gets a sense of an incredibly large and unwieldy ship on an ill-fated voyage. . . . Bush ordered Ridge, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget, and White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to come up with a plan for a new agency. . . . The drafting was to be top secret with only a handful of aides involved and meetings in the White House basement. It is interesting to note that none of these men has ever headed a large business or government agency. Bush's biggest business experience was with the Texas Rangers, and he had partners with lots experience in management. . . . With this enormous absence of experience in managing or devising a major operation, civilian or otherwise, the team came up with the 170,000 person Department of Homeland Security, a mammoth proposal that seems to go against every trend for streamlined and effective government from the Grace Commission on. . . . Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Bush's plan is that it does not really deal with what we now know is the greatest breakdown in security in the months before Sept. 11. The U.S. security apparatus failed to cooperate and coordinate its terrorism leads so that the president and the policy makers could take preventative action.

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Of course, we now know that another "troubling aspect" of Bush's collossal bureucratic bungle was that it brought about the impotentence of FEMA and cost thousands of U.S. citizens their lives. Has there ever been a worse example of government or greater failure of leadership and immagination in human history than the Bush Crime Family has brought about? I doubt that there has.

posted by LoZo 3:07 PM