NYT LTTEs: Bush and his Can't Do government

[BurtWorm]

Readers respond to David Brooks and his lame excuses for Bushist failures:


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/opinion/l13brooks.html


To the Editor:

"The Best Laid Plan: Too Bad It Flopped," by David Brooks (column, Sept. 11), reveals the true pessimism of the conservative viewpoint in America.

The neocons, after four years of touting themselves as the champions of the American "can do" spirit in their efforts to transform the Middle East, faced with the miserable failure of the government response to Katrina, shrug their shoulders and tell us that we expect too much from our government.

The problem isn't government; the problem is this government and its apparent lack of interest in living up to its own "can do" rhetoric.

Chandran Seshagiri
Arlington, Mass., Sept. 11, 2005





To the Editor:

David Brooks says liberals "need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government."

Of course it won't. But it should provoke America's intolerance of incompetent government.

Such failure is not inevitable; government built the levees, and parts of government were trying to improve them. And bureaucracy is not limited to government; I have seen many documents in private industry that were just as absurd as New Orleans's emergency preparedness plan.

Rather than attack the idea of government - even while grudgingly admitting its necessity - we must understand which parts of the New Orleans plan worked and which ones didn't, and why some government agencies were effective while others were useless.

Bruce Burger
Seattle, Sept. 11, 2005