WASHINGTON: Is President Bush the leader of the US government, or is he just a right-wing talk-show host? The question comes to mind after Bush’s news conference this week in which he sounded like someone who has no control over the government he is in charge of. His words were those of a pundit inveighing against the evils of bureaucrats.

“Obviously,” said the critic-in-chief, “there are some times when government bureaucracies haven’t responded the way we wanted them to, and like citizens, you know, I don’t like that at all.” Yes, and if you can’t do something about it, who can? Bush went on: “I mean, I think, for example, of the trailers sitting down in Arkansas. Like many citizens, they’re wondering why they’re down there, you know. How come we’ve got 11,000?”

Bush was talking about 10,777 mobile homes ordered up to provide housing for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. As Representative Mike Ross put it in an interview, most of these ‘brand-new, fully furnished homes are sitting in a hay meadow in Hope, Arkansas’, and are ‘a symbol of what’s wrong with this administration and what’s wrong with FEMA’.

Ross, a Democrat whose district includes that hay meadow, has been running a one-man crusade since December to get the homes moved to where they could actually provide shelter for those left homeless by the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency let the homes sit there because its regulations don’t permit the use of such structures in a flood plain.

Why did FEMA spend anywhere from $300 million to $430 million to buy homes that didn’t meet its own regulations? Alternatively, why can’t it alter its regulations at least temporarily to use the homes where they are desperately needed?

This episode is important because it is representative of a corrosive style of politics. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans have done a good business over the years running against the ills of Big Government. They are so much in the habit of trashing government that even when they are in charge of things they pretend they are not.

And when their own government fails, they turn around and use their incompetence to argue that government can never work anyway, so you might as well keep electing conservatives to have less government. — Dawn/The Washington Post News Service