From Michael O'Hare at Mark Klieman we get another description of how the Bush White House functions, with a comparison to the history of the Shogunate in Japan. O'Hare's description is about what I thought.
From the beginning, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have run the Federal Government, with Bush performing the ceremonial Presidential functions and giving speeches in front of carefully vetted audiences who will not contradict or challenge him.
Suddenly the Saturday Cheney shooting exposes (again) the dysfunctionality of this White House. The Vice President runs his own operation without significant input or control by the staff of the President, and he has no oversight. When critical decisions have to be made, they generally come from the Vice President's office. Bush doesn't like complicated decisions. He wants his staff to tell him how the problem will be solved, and all Bush has to do is say yes or no. More complicated and time critical stuff comes from Cheney's office. Bush has "delegated" that kind of stuff to him.
This is why no one in the White House took control of the Katrina reaction. That was supposed to be "delegated" to FEMA, but no one higher up realized that FEMA had been gutted when it was folded into the new Department of Homeland Security. Then Cheney was on vacation in Montana most of that week. There was no one in the White House to pull things together, realize that an administrative disaster was occurring on the Gulf Coast and make the federal government react. The Congressional report this week and the hearings with Chertoff have made this very clear. But Katrina was history being described. The Saturday Cheney shooting shows the same weakness.
The shooting happened on a Saturday when Cheney was on vacation. Then, Cheney was almost certainly in shock and reacted badly as is normal when someone is in a severe accident. Cheney went into a state of shock and reacted without lucid thought. He really does not like the Press, so he reacted in his normal manner by cutting the Press completely out of the loop. He was in a funk at least through Wednesday and probably still is. He unfortunately has no superior except Bush to tell him to snap out of it and get the story out to the Press before it eats the White House alive. Bush should have done this.
But Bush does not like conflict, so he was not going to beard Cheney in his den. In the absence of initiative from the President there is no one else with sufficient stature in the White House to shake things up. Bush also has no interest in the mechanics of government, so he isn't going to trust his instincts on how to handle the Press over those of Cheney. With Dick Cheney in his funk-based paralysis and both Bush and Cheney living in a bubble in which bad news is not easily given to them, no one in the White House did anything useful at all until finally Rove took matters in hand and got Cheney to go on FOX News.
The last element of the problem is that the Republicans generally are very "top-down leadership" oriented. Subordinates are there to respond to orders from the superior beings they work for, not to second-guess those orders and critique the performance of their superiors. This is part of what we all know about Bush not liking to hear bad news. Cheney is no different. Glenn Greenwald describes it as the "Bush Cult." No one was going to put their career on the line and take initiative. Even if they got everything right, they were likely to get their head handed to them. This White House is famous for its top-down discipline. Of the Bush/Cheney/Rove triumvirate who run the White House, only Rove seems to have news sources that can break through the White House information bubble.
So now we know for sure that this White House is thoroughly dysfunctional. But was there any doubt, except in the details?
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