You can say this about the Bush administration: where others
might see problems, it sees opportunities.

A slump in the economy was an opportunity to push a tax cut that
provided very little stimulus in the short run, but will place huge demands
on the budget in 2010. An electricity shortage in California was an
opportunity to push for drilling in Alaska, which would have produced no
electricity and hardly any oil until 2013 or so. An attack by lightly armed
terrorist infiltrators was an opportunity to push for lots of heavy weapons
and a missile defense system, just in case Al Qaeda makes a frontal
assault with tank divisions or fires an ICBM next time.

President George H. W. Bush once confessed that he was somewhat
lacking in the "vision thing." His son's advisers don't have that problem:
they have a powerful vision for America's future. In that future, we have
recently learned, the occupant of the White House will have the right to
imprison indefinitely anyone he chooses, including U.S. citizens, without
any judicial process or review. But they are rather less interested in the
reality thing.

For the distinctive feature of all the programs the administration has
pushed in response to real problems is that they do little or nothing to
address those problems. Problems are there to be used to pursue the
vision. And a problem that won't serve that purpose, whether it's the
collapse of confidence in corporate governance or the chaos in the
Middle East, is treated as an annoyance to be ignored if possible,
or at best addressed with purely cosmetic measures. Clearly, George
W. Bush's people believe that real-world problems will solve themselves,
or at least won't make the evening news, because by pure coincidence
they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.

But real problems, if not dealt with, have a way of festering.  In the last
few weeks, a whole series of problems seem to have come to a head.
Yesterday's speech notwithstanding, Middle East  policy is obviously
adrift. The dollar and the stock market are plunging, threatening an
already shaky economic recovery. Amtrak has been pushed to the
edge of shutdown, because it couldn't get the administration's attention.
And the federal government itself is about to run out of money, because
House Republicans are unwilling to face reality and increase the federal
debt limit. (This avoidance thing  seems to be contagious.)

So now would be a good time to do what the White House always
urges its critics to do - put partisanship aside. Will Mr. Bush be willing
to set aside, even for a day or two, his drive to consolidate his political
base, and actually do something that wasn't part of his preconceived
agenda? Oh, never mind.

I think that most commentators missed the point of the story about
Mr. Bush's commencement speech at Ohio State, the one his aide said
drew on the thinking of Emily Dickinson, Pope John Paul II, Aristotle
and Cicero, among others. Of course the aide's remarks were silly
- but they gave us an indication of the level of sycophancy that Mr.
Bush apparently believes to be his due. Next thing you know we'll be
told that Mr. Bush is also a master calligrapher, and routinely swims
across the Yangtze River. And nobody will dare laugh: just before
Mr. Bush gave his actual, Aristotle-free speech, students at Ohio State
were threatened with expulsion and arrest if they heckled him.

It's interesting to note that the planned Department of Homeland Security,
while of dubious effectiveness in its announced purpose, will be protected
against future Colleen Rowleys: the new department will be exempted from
both whistle-blower protection and the Freedom of Information Act.

But back to the festering problems: on the economic side, this is starting to
look like the most dangerous patch for the nation and the world since the
summer of 1998. Back then, luckily, our economic policy was run by smart
people who were prepared to learn from their mistakes. Can you say the
same about this administration?

As I've noted before, the Bush administration has an infallibility complex:
it never, ever, admits making a mistake. And that kind of arrogance tends,
eventually, to bring disaster. You can read all about it in Aristotle.