George gave a little speech in Ohio last week, questioning John’s leadership fitness. The elected senator from Massachusetts, charged the pseudo-president from Texas, would disrupt the economy and conduct an “uncertain” foreign policy “in the face of danger.”

Oh my. Things could actually get worse?

Like, I suppose, John might launch an ill-conceived, ill-planned, unnecessary war? Perhaps invade Brazil if Cuba attacks? Fiddle as our industrial base burns? Or maybe spend oodles of money he doesn’t have?

One needn’t be a John F. Kerry fan to see the utter absurdity – and outright black comedy – of George W. Bush questioning another’s leadership potential.

America, as its majority now accepts, has sunk to skid-row status under Bush’s inimitable superintendence. Things were already bad enough when, within twenty-four hours of the president’s leadership lecture, yet two more news items elevated the absurdity and further blackened the comedy of it all.

First, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan awoke from his fiscal slumber, heard of Bush’s staggering deficits and promptly deployed the versatile applications of the word “significant.”

These deficits, he growled, pose a “significant obstacle to long-term stability” and “significant fiscal challenges in the years ahead.” Not just obstacles and challenges, mind you, but significant ones, which is diplomatic economic jive for, “We’re screwed.”

Greenspan may be suffering from short-term memory loss because of such frightening long-term instability, but I’m not quite there yet. I recall even us amateur economists saying during the 2000 campaign that Bush’s Ponzi economic scheme was a sure-fire, Reaganomic recipe for massive deficits. I also recall the fed chairman thumbs-upping the president’s less-taxes-more-spending madness as we on the left screamed for some sober intervention.

It’s too late now. George II’s whimsical leadership and fiscal insobriety have done robbed and wrecked the exchequer. He has left today’s newborns that gift that keeps on giving: unrelenting debt and its wasteful, oppressive premiums.

Contemporaneous with the news of Greenspan’s reeducation came the barely newsworthy revelation that Bush stands by his man, Donald Rumsfeld. Despite a White House official declaring the president “was not … happy about the way he was informed about the pictures” related to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the president declared “I’ve got confidence in the secretary of defense.”

We all do, Mr. Bush. We’re all confident he’ll never change. I differ, however, with those who believe the blind and arrogant bureaucrat should be canned.

The Iraq War is Mr. Bush’s war. Rumsfeld didn’t order it. According to recent reports he didn’t even advise it. He merely executed a guaranteed disaster ordered up by his clueless boss, and anyone familiar with the vicissitudes of war knows scandalous crimes such as prisoner abuse are part and parcel of the operation. Those in Congress and punditry expressing shock are less in need of Mr. Rumsfeld’s head than a history book.

Secretary of State Colin Powell blurted the obvious when he volunteered on “Larry King Live” that “in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and then.”

As proof he cited the My Lai massacre – an unconscionable yet predictable wartime tragedy in which several hundred Vietnamese women, children and old men were slaughtered by American troops. No doubt some of the red-blooded culprits were mowing small-town lawns on bright Saturday mornings in 1967; a year later they were butchering unarmed civilians.

Even a just war unleashes emotions and behavior once unimagined. Senseless tragedies become unavoidable. What made My Lai especially tragic, however, was that the war in which it took place was entirely avoidable. So was Mr. Bush’s war – excepting, with admitted circular logic, that his failure of provident leadership made it much less so.

The president’s Rasputin, Karl Rove, recently confided to an administration colleague that America’s standing in the Arab world has been crippled for a generation to come. That’s probably optimistic. Nevertheless, if true, Bush’s war qualifies as the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history. We have yet to glean the full measure of its consequences. Perhaps our grandchildren will.

At home and abroad – from acute fiscal mismanagement to chronic foreign misadventures – Bush is leading the American Experiment into descent and collapse. President Kerry may be sorry he ever wanted the job.

© Copyright 2004 P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.