Krugman:

There is a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program and the nonexistent energy program.

John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. … I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.”

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That is why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It is why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it is why the state of the union — the thing itself and not the speech — is so grim.

Sometimes, just when you think the levels of incompetency, corruption, and near-criminality in the BushCo administration can’t get any worse, they up the ante and pull another one out of their bag of crap. Krugman, via Atrios (who reposted the entire thing “for educational purposes”):

The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren’t on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action.

At first, federal officials were oblivious. “This is going very well,” a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can’t do anything right.

But government works when it’s run by people who take public policy seriously. As Jonathan Cohn points out in The New Republic, when Medicare began 40 years ago, things went remarkably smoothly from the start. But this time the people putting together a new federal program had one foot out the revolving door: this was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists.

…

Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms - firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill - while still in public office. He left public service, if that’s what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies.

Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill’s point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby.

Go read the entire thing over at Eschaton. Krugman wonderfully ties together the threads of this debacle and the political machine that is at the center of the Abramoff and Delay scandals. He concludes with an important question.

So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn’t the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news?