[tw]

From the cover story of The Economist on 29 September 2005 (italics added by me) is this major concession:

What's gone wrong for America's right
The Economist has always had all sorts of ideological disagreements with Mr Bush, but our main problem with his administration has increasingly become incompetence. Katrina now stands besides the shambles overseas in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay as supporting evidence. Mr Bush is a bold decision-maker, but he is also a delegator who too often picks the wrong people and seldom fires them. Both "Rummy" and "Brownie" ... are symptoms of the same problem.

America's system of political appointees always risks putting the well connected, rather than the well qualified, into top jobs. But Mr Bush has abused this more than most. ...

The most important is fiscal profligacy. Mr Bush has increased spending more than any president since Johnson, and cut taxes with the enthusiasm of Ronald Reagan. Second, far too much cash has gone on earmarked pork-barrel projects without economic justification. There is $24 billion-worth of such gunk in the highway bill, including the notorious $231m "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska, put there by the chairman of the House transportation committee. ...

Mr Bush is currently resisting attempts to set up an independent inquiry into what went wrong: he would prefer to have an inquiry led by a White House adviser. This is heinous. A thousand people have died and the tax payer faces a bill of up to $200 billion. If those two things do not merit independent investigation, then what on earth does? ...