THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

For some years now, I have been convinced that Our Dear Embattled Leader and his evil minions with one purpose in mind, to enable Grover Norquislings wish to shrink government until it was small enough to drown in the bathtub. I always thought I was the only one who saw that. And then today in the Smirking Chimp what do I see, someone who thinks like me!

George Bush and Dick Cheney came to Washington, after all, not to run the government but to run it down.

They figured maybe they'd get a couple of Supreme Court nominations, and maybe get a shot at taking out Saddam, but the main mission of Bush and Cheney was to leave Washington less than they found it.

And they wasted no time getting down to it, most triumphantly with their massive tax cuts of 2001. The cuts would leave less revenue to pay for federal programs, saddle future presidents with crippling deficits and debt-interest payments, make the middle class pay more and lighten the load on the rich.

Bush/Cheney also packed federal departments - EPA, Justice, State, FEMA, Defense and others - with multiple layers of true-believing appointees. Their job was to freeze out career public servants and radically shift their institutions from active mode to passive to somnolent in such areas as environmental protection, voting/civil rights and social services.

But Osama bin Laden plotted while Bush worked out, and on September 11, 2001, the Saudi-born terrorist changed everything for the president who blew into Washington looking to dismantle the infrastructure. Suddenly, Bush and his fellow would-be pillagers had to figure out how to marshal the manifold resources of government - including those experienced, dedicated public servants previously regarded as quaint anachronisms - to actually accomplish things.

It's no wonder, then, that the Bush team mangled the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, as documented in a new 600-page report written by Republican members of a select House of Representatives committee. No wonder that a centerpiece of Bush's presidency, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, has proved to be a break-the-bank boondoggle. No wonder that America now finds itself ensnared in the deadly folly of Iraq, with thousands of lives lost, reconstruction hopelessly mismanaged and billions of dollars missing and/or stolen.....

.....And one enormously important thing that the intelligence community got right - that there was no evidence of a meaningful working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida - Bush disregarded. Indeed, he told the world exactly the opposite, and most of us believed him, myself included.

This rehash of the last five years of failure, incompetence and twisting of truth by Bush and his administration casts a different kind of light on the National Security Agency no-warrant spying operation Bush secretly authorized more than four years ago: Even assuming it's legal, what are the chances that the Bush team is managing it with the care, precision and caution required of a program with such a massive potential for abuse? Two chances, as my brother likes to say: Slim and none.

Slim just left town.