Garrison Keillor has some thoughts about the Republican bureaucracy:

The headline of the AP story was "Bush urges confidence in his leadership"--which is like "Author says memoir is true" or "FEMA offers contingency plan"--and I didn't bother to read further. The Old Brush Cutter never got the knack of urging, and whenever he tries, he looks small and petulant, like a cartoon of himself. He photographs well in formal situations, and he is good at keeping a low profile when necessary, which is a key to survival in politics, as in boxing, but when it comes to the hortatory, he gets all hissy and squinty.

I have to admit I've never considered what Mr Bush does to be 'leadership.' It's an intangible concept, really hard to define. Leadership is what a person exudes when you want to follow him/her, to do what he/she is urging.

I'll tell you what a leader is: someone walking down some steps, leading to the gates of Hell. He truns around, looks at you and says, "Hey, Bob, come with me. I may need some help." And you stand up and follow him.

That's a leader. An inspired leader. He's inspired trust in you. For myself, I wouldn't want to be within 500 meters of the Brush-Cutter-in-Chief when he had a tool in his hands.

Consider what the "leader" of the "small government" party has produced:

[T]the report of the Office of Personnel Management showing that the federal government continues to grow under Republican rule. The executive branch now employs 1.85 million at an average salary of $63,125. In our nation's capital, the average is a handsome $80,425. Of course, the hiring of screeners at airports raised the total, but screeners' average salary is around $27,000 a year, which pulls down the average, which means there must be many happy folks in the higher ranges, assistant pooh-bahs and panjandrums and dukes of earl who are adept at taking a small acorn and weaving a seven-hour day around it, for which they enjoy job security, 13 paid holidays and 21 vacation days, and retirement at up to 80 percent of salary.

Republicans believe in smaller government and deregulation, but it takes more and more of their friends and loved ones to not regulate us, and who can blame them? Washington is the perfect place for the slacker child who flubbed his way through college and flopped in business and whom friends and family kept having to prop up--find him a government job. Government service is a broadening experience. It certainly has been for President Bush. He has traveled to China and Europe and other places that never interested him before. He has come into contact with the poor people of New Orleans in a way that never would have occurred to him in his earlier years. He has met opera singers and jazz musicians and journalists. This is all good.

The bit about all his business failures, of course, is pure gold. The man has failed at every single thing he has ever tried. Driven at least 5 companies into the ground, and now his biggest score: driving a country into bankruptcy. Sadly, this time there will be no friends of his father to bail us out.

A guy who never opens his mouth without lying. A guy who has no intellectual interst in anything. No curiosity, no desire to strive. When I heard this guy has to take his own special pillow with him when he travels I knew we were in for a rocky ride. Beddy-byes at 9 PM? Please.

Garrison has a few parting thoughts:

So why does he still seem so small, our president? In his presidential library, he'll be portrayed as Abraham Lincoln after Chancellorsville and FDR after Corregidor, but to most of us, the crisis in Washington today stems from a man intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to rise to the challenge. Most of us sense that when, decades from now, the story of this administration comes out, it will be one of ordinary incompetence, of rigid and incurious people overwhelmed by events in a world they don't dare look around and see.