BAGHDAD-ON-THE-GULF

We don't read Tom Friedman much lately, at least not with any expectation of enlightenment. But he surprised us the other day with a couple of things he wrote about the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his bullshit regime in re: Hurricane Katrina:

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

And this:

...[T]hen there are the [chief bullshitter's] standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe [he] will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane -- it's your hurricane."

Except that FEMA's Brownie Boy and Homeland Security's Mikey the Mouth have already told us that. As well as this:

POSITIVE COVERAGE

-- Leon Freilich

Not coincidentally, we lately feel toward the cutesiness of Maureen Dowd much as we do toward Friedman's folksiness. But the other day she suprised us, too, with this:

The administration's foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love -- the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq ... they see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice ... So much for [the bullshitter's] "culture of life."

By contrast, have a look at Dow Jones chairman Peter Kann's commentary in the editorial pages of today's Wall Street Journal. What an embarrassment! (One formidable reporter in the newsroom of that illustrious paper proposes assigning Peter to the Baghdad bureau.)

It's hard to decide which is worse, though: the awfulness of Kann's take on Iraq or David Brooks's fatuous commentary, "Katrina's silver lining." If there's any silver lining to be found, it's that Katrina has stripped everyone of the illusion -- assuming they still had it -- that the chief bullshitter's regime is more competent at home than in Iraq.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands