In one short, pin-prick of a paragraph, the New York Times summed up the most incompetent president in U.S. history. The occasion was a speech, delivered yesterday from the Rose Garden, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest natural disaster to hit this country since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, according to CNN.

From today’s lead editorial, New York Times:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

Reality check, please! From Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal:

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico…

In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district …

The Bush administration’s policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge… In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane.

"There’s no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report’s authors. The chairman of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we’re doing."

Ah yes, The faith-based response of the unreality-based Administration. Well it’s not exactly a surprise. As George Packer of the New Yorker ruefully observed, once "you knew who the surgeon was, you knew what the operation would look like." He was speaking not of the hurricane but of Operation — what is it now? — Infinite Justice? Enduring Freedom? Infinite and Enduring War Forever and Ever Until the Day We Die?

Everybody loves what we’re doing.

Shall we run our reel of Richie Rich through the projector one more time? An intellectually lazy frat boy gets ahead through family pull, screws up every job he holds, is repackaged by a gay-baiting slime-meister (Karl Rove), adopts the Republicans’s updated Southern Strategy (anti-black rhetoric switched out for anti-gay), and becomes a mouthpiece for fake "issues" that have little to do with governance but are sure to fire up the testosterone of ill-educated, Left-Behind dumbbells — gay fucking marriage, the sanctity of unborn blastocysts, Jesus Jesus Jesus, and guns, guns, guns.

Meanwhile, our hero couldn’t care less about rabbit-rutting homos or low-rent fetuses or the blue-collar knuckleheads his ministers ship off to Iraq without enough body armor to cover their po’-white and po’-black asses.

What he really is (much like the fake president standing next to the fake Marilyn at New Orleans’ Magnolia Mansion — now, we assume, roof-high in Gulf waters) is the empty suit in the window, the face man for the top 2% that own everything major in this country, the totally scripted Robo-Bush pitching dried-up Republican schemes to knock out New Deal reforms like Social Security and Medicare and shoot loopholes though the tax code to help the very wealthy slip through and not pay their fair (and understandably large) share of taxes — the very money that might have actually bought the army good armor.

Everybody’s just crazy about what we’re doing.

And meanwhile, while the Great Depression safety nets are being cut and arms and legs are left behind on an the oil-blazing fields of Haliburton-on-the-Euphrates, the flag is waving, the flag is gleaming off little lapel pins, the Republican appointees are standing behind the President in the Rose Garden with their dour jowls and lachrymose eye bags, registering great concern for the poor folk stuck up on those rooftops in New Orleans and raising hell in looting sprees thorough the French Quarter, and there’s a lot of talk about Freedom and Prayer (also zero-tolerance for the looters; let’s not forget how property — like marriage — is Jesus-ordained sacred in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave) and How everything is Bound to Work Out Fine.

Let’s see now. Second term. President working on legacy. Shall we look at the score card?

1. Not Elected But Selected by Daddy’s Buds
2. Tech Wreck
3. Recession
4. Superb Job of Clearing Brush in Crawford,
   Too Busy to Scan Memo “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US.”
5. 9/11 — The Attack “Nobody Could Foresee”
6. Iraqi-Nam War
7. Oil Prices Off the Charts
8. $$$ Meltdown, Thanks to Record-Breaking Trade Deficits
9. American Credibility Meltdown, Thanks to Torture Memos
10. New Orleans G-O-N-E — Another Disaster "Nobody Could Foresee"

And still we have two years to go. But don’t worry. Everybody loves what we’re doing.

Special thanks to Michael Martin for his 10-point Legacy Report