Along with their daily propaganda, George W. Bush and his many appointees have demonstrated legendary incompetence. Whatever the issue, ranging from those WMDs “definitely” in Iraq and its subsequent reconstruction, to the response to Hurricane Katrina, to the “success” of No Child Left Behind, to energy policy, and to environmental protection, the examples of this administration’s propaganda are far too numerous and too appalling to enumerate.

But while the propaganda has been and will continue to be exposed, as The New York Times finally did concerning administration and Pentagon use of ex-military personnel to promote the Iraq War, it is the incompetence that involves the most cunning and potentially long-term damage.

Bush and his party continually complain that government cannot solve problems effectively and efficiently but is instead a sinkhole of waste and corruption. Never mind that, from 2000 to 2006, GOP Congressional earmarks and administration no-bid contracts for big campaign donors increased enormously. Never mind also that, in sharp contrast to the percentage cost of free-market healthcare in the overall GNP of the United States, socialized healthcare in Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan amounts to only half the percentage cost in their respective GNPs. (And the average life-expectancy in each of those nations is higher than in the United States. Thus, less expensive socialized medicine gets better results than more expensive free-market medicine does.)

The Republican solution to “big gubment” has been to make it even more expensive for taxpayers by privatizing such functions as security (Blackwater being only one of the greediest and most violent of American mercenary services), roads and transportation (Fluor, Star Solutions, et al.), water systems (Bechtel, for example), education (“Edison” schools, vouchers, etc.), medical care (made even more inadequate by Medical Savings Accounts), and Social Security (which the GOP can’t wait to hand over to prudent and honest Wall Street investors).

If we think that privatization is the answer to efficient and competent services, we need to recognize how much more costly (in every way) the mercenaries of Blackwater and other security companies are in Iraq than our soldiers are. We need to recognize how much more expensive private schools are than public ones, how much more costly (and less reliable) water is from private companies than from municipalities, and how much less secure retirement will be under inauspicious management by Wall Street. If we want to avoid both costliness and incompetence, as in the case of the present credit and foreclosure situations, don’t trust private, unregulated free-enterprisers to deliver the goods.

Overall, though, the most cunning effect of incompetence by Bush and his appointees is that these leaders have it both ways. On the one hand, they make the federal government dysfunctional so that it can’t (or won’t) perform its responsibilities to the law and to the common good. For example, misdirected by Bush politicos, the Environmental Protection Agency is only one glaring example of long-standing laws, regulations, policies, and practices being re-defined or curtailed to the benefit of polluters and the detriment of ecological and public health.

On the other hand, by making the government dysfunctional, the current administration conveys to many (perhaps even most) Americans the belief that government can’t be trusted with anything and that the free market stands ever-ready to solve what government does not. But even more Machiavellian than these effects of incompetence and ideological misdirection is the wiliness with which Bush, his appointees, and the GOP have managed to avoid the public’s open outrage against failed leadership. That wiliness involves a Rovian strategy of shifting blame to all politicians—to all government—or to the system itself.

Granted, government, especially the current one, deserves our skepticism and even suspicion. Indeed, one of the clearest examples of this wily (and irresponsible) shifting of blame has been the White House’s criticism of the nation’s intelligence community and security agencies for “systemic break-down” in the lead-up to 9/11. And yet, not one person among the entire Bush administration, its appointees, and the federal bureaucracy was ever held to account for any aspect of the multiple failures that allowed 9/11 to occur. Not one. This is accountability, Republican-style.

No doubt, the most egregious example of this administration’s incompetent leadership, for which we will pay in every way long into the future, is the Iraq War itself. This, too, Bush and his administration try to blame on a systemic breakdown in intelligence. As he complained disingenuously in an interview on May 13 of this year with the Politico Web site, “I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.”

Yes, there was a breakdown in intelligence; but it was in the intelligence of Bush and his advisors—not in that of the intelligence community. Rewriting history, this White House tries to deny that it ignored hard evidence and silenced expert views contradicting its pre-established aim to invade Iraq. Moreover, Bush, Cheney, and their appointees “cherry-picked” and distorted intelligence and even lied about it in order to justify their war. This was no case of systemic breakdown but instead of incompetent executive leadership.

And the craftiest of all results is that, even though most Americans know they’ve been had, Bush, Cheney, and the GOP still succeed because they’ve gotten them to distrust government itself.

Dennis M. Welch lives, teaches, and writes in Blacksburg.