From Newsweek, as clear an indication of the failure of leadership. It isn’t that bush failed to act it is more that he lives within such a bubble of privilege and has made is clear to his staff that he cannot face unpleasant truths that he is incapable of creating any real leadership for this country. It is hard to have vision with one eye closed.

Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president’s early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

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The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

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How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

A President less in touch than the average 8th grader with events of the day is not a President who has the well-being of his nation foremost in his mind, as his campaign in 2004 hammered into us day after day and was the cornerstone of his entire election strategy. It is just the opposite. This is a President so obsessed with himself and his own invicibility and righteousness that he cannot let a little thing like reality interfere with his elevation to Sainthood.

And maintaining that bubble along with the web of lies necessary to make it appear he is something he is not has been, as David Brooks finally admits, the standard policy of this administration since day one.

On the September 11 edition of NBC’s syndicated The Chris Matthews Show, New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed that he has learned from private conversations with Bush officials who “represent” what “Bush believes” that from its earliest days, the Bush administration adopted a policy of shielding itself from political damage by never publicly admitting any mistake — even if it meant lying to the media and the American public. The fact that Bush doesn’t admit mistakes has been reported by the media for years. For instance, in the September 11 edition of The New York Times, David Sanger reported, “Mr. Bush, his aides acknowledge, is loath to fire members of his administration or to take public actions that are tantamount to an admission of a major mistake.” Brooks himself has previously noted the Bush administration’s unwillingness to admit to mistakes. But what Brooks’s September 11 account adds is that Bush is being intentionally dishonest — in Brooks’s words, “totally tactical and totally insincere” — in resisting such public admissions and in blaming others when failures are too obvious to deny.

Lying is the official policy of this administration.