The U.S. Secretary of the Interior is supposed to protect the nation’s natural resources. But James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, opposed virtually every effort at environmental protection. This is what he told the House Interior Committee in 1981:

That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have: to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

His reassurances were lip service. However you might characterize Watt’s failure to protect our environment and natural resources, it wasn’t incompetence. Watt was a conscientious proponent of extraction, and an enemy of conservation. The environment was something to exploit, to bleed dry, never something to preserve and protect. He never had any interest or intention to defend our natural resources.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson makes some good points when he writes about Bush the Incompetent:

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.

In numbing profusion, the newspapers are filled with litanies of screw-ups.…

It’s the president’s prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), though, that is his most mind-boggling failure. As was not the case in Iraq or with Katrina, it hasn’t had to overcome the opposition of man or nature. Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it (not yet, anyway). But in what must be an unforeseen development, people are trying to get their medications covered under the program. Apparently, this is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared, as it has been singularly unable to get its own program up and running.

Initially, Part D’s biggest glitch seemed to be the difficulty that seniors encountered in selecting a plan. But since Part D took effect on Jan. 1, the most acute problem has been the plan’s failure to cover the 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medications had been covered by Medicaid. On New Year’s Day, the new law shifted these people’s coverage to private insurers. And all hell broke loose.

…

No such problems attended the creation of Medicare itself in the mid-1960s. Then, a governmental agency simply assumed responsibility for seniors’ doctor and hospital visits. But, financially beholden to both the drug and insurance industries, the Bush administration and the Repsublican Congress mandated that millions of Americans have their coverage shifted to these most byzantine of bureaucracies.

This is, remember, the president’s signature domestic initiative, just as the Iraq war is his signature foreign initiative.

How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn’t explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed, in understanding why Bush entrusted his new drug entitlement to a financial mainstay of modern Republicanism. To sloth, in understanding why Incurious George has repeatedly ignored the work of experts whose advice runs counter to his desires.

I think Meyerson is mistaken in attributing the Bush Administration’s many failures to incompetence. There’s plenty of that, too, I suppose. But over and over again, I find myself thinking, when the Administration drops the ball on helping people in need, that they never had any interest or intention to succeed. They are governed by a malign will that’s partly disguised by Bush’s stumbling “aw, shucks” public persona. Incompetence is a cover story.

“Bush the Incompetent?” That’s letting this Administration off too easy.