Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it's hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things -- particularly when most of them were the president's own initiatives.

GOP Deals In Congress Prompt Call For Change
Big Decisions Made Without Democrats

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; A01

House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would have saved the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The Senate version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs their reimbursement, lowering payments $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion of the projected savings, according to CBO and other health policy experts.

I want this bloated, back-room-hatched piece of godawful legislation hung around every GOP incumbent's neck between now and November 2006. Every campaign stop, every radio show, every "meet and greet" by a GOP incumbent, I want some citizen to stand up and say: You actually supported that heap of useless, life-threatening, budget-busting, insurance-company-pandering obscenity of a program? Even I - news junkie that I am - can't keep up with every new nightmare revelation coming up about it. One day, the states say they have to step in during the transition period and pay for prescriptions, the next day the feds are telling the insurance companies should eat the costs, tomorrow ... who knows? The UN will be told to step in and eat it, is my guess.