Bush's fate, destiny, and legacy will not be determined by people who have, with real reason, opposed him.
Bush's place on the dustbin is being prepared by those in business and power who supported him in the first place and now see that he is fouling up their interests.
David Olive says it best.
The legacy of the Bush administration may well be that government can no longer be entrusted to business people.
Many of the most prominent CEOs in the current administration aren't real business people at all, but faux CEOs who after a lifetime in politics cashed in on brief stints as trophy CEOs at Fortune 500 firms before returning to public life in George W. Bush's White House.
With few exceptions, those CEO stints -- at Halliburton Co. (Dick Cheney), rail operator CSX Corp. (John Snow), and George "dry hole" Bush's string of oil-exploration flops in Texas -- were not models of exemplary corporate stewardship.
Just the same, future historians will make the connection between the most CEO-heavy administration in memory, headed by the first MBA president (Harvard, no less), and a White House of unsurpassed fiscal recklessness, flawed strategic thinking, failure to execute even on its best ideas (its unrealized goals of education reform and energy self-sufficiency, for instance), and a stubborn unwillingness to change course when conditions dictate.
The really hilarious bit is that it comes back to bite them in the ass. From all accounts, Cheney was a junior-varsity second-team jock sniffer and drop out at Yale. He was saved from an inevitable and well deserved fate of being a Niedermayeresque fragging victim in 'Nam, because he had the rare good sense to find a girlfriend smart enough to write his papers, and yet stupid enough to fall for him.
He was in no way prepared to be the CEO of a major corporation. Just as he was in no way prepared for competence in leadership or politics. Yet he has traded his brutish incompetency in positions in both realms to further his career.
Likewise his puppet Georgie Bush and most of the other "business background" types in the government.
These are not really business leaders, they just play at being CEO's between Republican administrations.
They have neither the instincts, the background nor the training to run a business, so their attempt to run government along business lines is a double-fantasy.
These guys operate by pretending to be in business. They've pretended all their lives. So when crisis occurs they improvise and resort to slap-dash bricolage by reflex.
We can see the results - they are consistent enough, and consistently bad.
"You can easily compare FEMA's internal resources to what you saw in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: a small, underfunded organization taking on a Herculian task under tremendous time pressure," Steven Schooner, a contracting expert at George Washington University, told The Wall Street Journal last week. "That is almost by definition a recipe for disaster."
These guys turn tail and revert to reflex ineptitude, croneyism and corruption - it is all they know, and it will be their undoing.
But for now, at least, the White House refuses to relinquish control of the biggest domestic reconstruction project in U.S. history, which will require the removal of enough debris across a six-state region to fill more than 600 football fields to a depth of 15 metres. Instead, as in Iraq, the administration has swung into action on behalf of Bush campaign donors, swiftly granting no-bid, cost-plus contracts in the Gulf Coast region to the usual suspects -- Halliburton, Bechtel Corp., and Fluor Corp.
Halliburton and Bechtel are under federal investigation for alleged government over-billing on Iraqi reconstruction contracts.
Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management, hired by FEMA to collect human remains in the Katrina-stricken region, is a subsidiary of funeral operator and longtime Bush contributor Service Corp. International (SCI). In Texas and Florida, SCI has settled class-action lawsuits alleging improper burial methods. (In one case, bodies were dug up and tossed in the woods so plots could be resold.)
Katrina subcontractor Goldstar EMS, a star-crossed ambulance provider, is being pursued for local tax arrears, is under federal investigation for suspected Medicaid fraud and is now operating in bankruptcy.
Another firm whose luck has changed for the better since Katrina is Bode Technology Group Inc., hired by FEMA to identify the bodies of storm victims. Bode was fired last month by Illinois state police over allegations of shoddy work.
The stench is rising. The business community will not be taking much more of this.
DFooK