Bush's Chernobyl

Here's what I remember about the Chernobyl disaster: veiled reports that something had gone drastically wrong with a nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, while the government of the Soviet Union doggedly insisted that there was no problem, that nothing had gone wrong. The evidence of nuclear disaster was there for all the world to see in the form of radioactive dust spreading through the upper atmosphere.

Then, suddenly, the Soviet government came clean, both at home and abroad. Mikhail Gorbachev decided that the lying simply couldn't continue, and broadened this notion to the whole of the Soviet government. The new policy became known as glasnost' ("openness" [or, more cynically, "publicity"]) which in turn was the foundation for perestroika ("reconstruction"). The process ultimately resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Hurricane Katrina has ruined the Gulf Coast, flattening and flooding cities, killing uncounted thousands, rendering many tens of thousands homeless refugees, taking as much as a third of the United States' supply of petroleum offline, not to mention capactiy to refine and transport it. Federal emergency management officials bluster defensively, but the fact on the ground is that there is essentially no federal capacity to respond to disaster.

More and more people are thinking that the Bush administration's response to the challenge of Katrina and her aftermath is a miserable failure. This perception spreading far beyond the Blue blogosphere. Crooks and Liars shows us an MSNBC report on Bush's flaccid address to the nation on Wednesday followed by a response from a survivor in Biloxi, Mississippi: "President Bush shouldn't be the president no more. President Bush ain't doing his job." And TBogg , who is reading The Corner at NRO so you don't have to, finds that even the Cornerites are giving Bush a failing grade.

Hurricane Katrina is George W. Bush's Chernobyl. The reality that he and his people were making for themselves has collapsed like a house of cards. George Bush is going down. Let's hope he doesn't take the Constitution with him when he does.