Airlines Chaos: More Bush Incompetence
April 11, 2008Perhaps the saddest thing about the Bush administration is how little Americans have come to expect of it. It has resulted in an orgy of incompetence that have seriously damaged first America’s image, and now our economy and very .
The current agony of more than 200,000 American Airlines passengers stranded on more than 2500 cancelled flights at America’s airports is just the latest example.
A competent administration would have kept the FAA on the case in the first place. A more foresighted administration would have recognized the cost to Americans and the economy of airlines like Aloha, ATA, Skybus and now Frontier failing. And a stronger administration would have acted in the crisis, like Truman did nationalizing the steel industry or, yes, Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union as a “peril to national safety”.
“The buck stops here,” Truman said. By contrast, the Bush Administration has done nothing. Nothing. There has been an absolute leadership vacuum. And sadly, that has come to be what we expect from it. Consider:
- The incompetent prosecution of the war in Iraq, led by my fellow Princeton alumni Donald Rumsfeld. I originally supported the war on the bill of goods sold us by the administration, but if you’re going to fight a war, win a war, smash the opposition and minimize casualties among U.S. troops. In five years none of that has happened.
- Where’s Osama? How’s that war on terror going? We’re not losing in Afghanistan, are we?
- Abu Ghraib.
- Katrina. One word. More than 1100 people died in New Orleans (in America!) after the hurricane. How many have died since or had their lives shortened by stress, disease, alcoholism, and the rest? How’s the rebuilding of New Orleans coming?
- The credit crisis, stock market crash and the foreclosure epidemic; where was government/adult supervision? A $600 rebate to spend on Japanese electronics, vacations or, more likely, on alcohol, is supposed to help how?
- Four dollar a gallon gasoline. If you make $8 an hour and commute 20 miles to work, it will take an hour (more after taxes) just to pay for your gas. Very soon, the economy will grind to a halt. Where’s that Iraqi oil when we need it? Where’s the Manhattan Project or Apollo program to achieve energy independence?
- Even ’small things’ like last summer’s passport crisis. Everyone needs a passport to travel now, but no additional staffing of the passport office=long lines, cancelled trips and general chaos. Now they’ve fully staffed the office with idiots who snoop in passport files.
And the media, distracted by its own evisceration, has done a piss-poor job of holding the administration accountable for its across-the-board failure of leadership.