Brooks and Flatline - September 23, 2005

JIM LEHRER: And, finally tonight, the analysis of Flatline and Brooks: Fake Democracy Founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
The hurricanes -- Johnny, the President canceled his trip to Texas tonight. Smart move on his part?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, Presidents don’t travel well when people are needing to get work done, because of all of the protective gear they take with them. And that serves a dual purpose, because it also means it’s hard for a President to ever get a first hand account of reality since he can rarely get close to it. It's really sad, though, to see a puppet desperate to look like he's doing something. Pathetic, actually.

JIM LEHRER: It just can't be helped. Is the president still in kind of a Katrina recovery mode of his own, David, do you think?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, he is in deep trial. The National Review Magazine on the right said President Bush has never been in so much trouble with the conservatives in the history of his life. So yes. Let alone with the rest of the country. The exhaustion, the disillusionment, the worry about the cost, it's just still building.

JIM LEHRER: Let's talk about the cost. You say the conservatives are upset. How upset are they and what are they going to do about it?

DAVID BROOKS: They are upset for a lot of reasons. Some of it is Katrina - anger just with reaction. A lot of it is that. Again Katrina is always the end of a long accumulation of events and for conservatives on spending, you have got a highway bill which was ridiculous, a travesty of pork barrel spending; you had an Ag bill; you had really five years in which George Bush has spent money at a faster clip than Lyndon Johnson.

JIM LEHRER: Say that again.

DAVID BROOKS: Domestic discretionary spending - non-defense spending - non-homeland security spending -- has increased.

JIM LEHRER: Non-Social Security, none all of those things -

DAVID BROOKS: -- has increased under George W. Bush twice as fast as under Bill Clinton, and faster than under Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatives didn't expect that in 2000. I guarantee you that. A lot of it is, frankly, the Republican Congress's fault. If you look back - when we look back on this period, we are going to look at a Congress that came preaching limited government but just has gone hog-wild in spending, and a president who never disciplined members of his own party to restrain themselves.
So there's just a lot of built-up anger and symbolically I think for a lot of conservatives there has to be what they call offsets, which are budget cuts to compensate for the cost -

JIM LEHRER: Of Katrina, of Rita --

DAVID BROOKS: And what we were about to say.

JIM LEHRER: Or Iraq or whatever.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

JIM LEHRER: What's your view of this, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I don’t know why David is referring to non defense spending. How about all spending period - especially defense spending and homeland security? Republicans like to separate defense spending because they want us to believe it’s a number that would be unthinkable to question. They never mention that our government debt is almost the same as our military spending, which means the Chinese are paying for our war, because we can’t actually afford it ourselves. There are no controls on spending, because the ‘NO’ button has been removed from our entire government. Bush is on track to becoming the biggest spending President in the history of the country. We can certainly blame Congress, too, if we want. But the President has the power to control Congress on this, just as Clinton did when he basically brought the government to a halt. That was real leadership. But Bush is too weak of a person for that.

JIM LEHRER: This George Bush.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, why the GOP was busy obsessing over Monica, Clinton brought this country from the crazy debts of Reagan, back to a responsible surplus. Now Bush has gone in there and spent money so fast, it makes Reagan look frugal. And it would be one thing if he actually spent it on something we could call a national investment. But he’s literally blown it, lost it, or snorted it away like a typical coke head. There is nothing to show for it. Not one single God damned thing. In fact, he’s taken that money, and made us worse off. And let’s not overlook the tiny headline recently of the unknown billions of US dollars that disappeared in Iraq. And I’m not talking about wasted ammunition. I’m talking about green backs, floating around in boxes, disappearing to God knows where. Maybe Bin Laden has them. Who knows? Why on earth were my tax dollars loaded into boxes and shipped anywhere I’ll never understand. But the leadership should be shot in the kneecaps for such nonsense.

JIM LEHRER: But, other than that, everything is just great, David.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I would draw a few distinctions. The first is the size of the debt right now as a percent of GDP is in a handleable range. The second, and this was the Bush case on the tax cuts --

JIM LEHRER: And why is it manageable? When you say GDP - meaning Gross Domestic Product --

DAVID BROOKS: Right. As a percentage of the total economy -

JIM LEHRER: Economy.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And this budget is not totally out of whack from where it's been, but I'm not going to excuse it so let me finish.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

DAVID BROOKS: The second thing to be said, and the Bush administration would say about the tax cuts, we have saw this year the fastest increase in revenues - I think $264 billion and they would say that's because of the economic growth generated by the tax cuts.
But I think the core point about the debt and the deficits -- and this is something conservatives and liberals are upset about -- you have got to make a distinction here. The distinction is between the poor, which it gets people upset - the wasteful spending -- the rise in domestic discretionary spending -- the education budget has gone up 42 percent. That's all serious.
But the really big story, the 90 percent of the story is entitlement spending; it's Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There are two debts here; there is the year-to-year debt, year-to-year debt, spending on things like Katrina and on these domestic programs. That's a debt but it's not going to kill us.
The entitlement debt is going to kill us. So you have got two issues here. And I would say to the president's credit, he at least tries to tackle on Social Security some way to get us the entitlement debts and he was stonewalled on that.

JIM LEHRER: What do you say, let's start with you, Johnny, both of you, about the idea whether it is an economic question or not and the deficit and all that stuff, that overwriting all of this a failure of the government, the President, the Congress and everybody and everybody else who is involved in just setting the priorities of the government of the United States?
And then you fit how much money you have into the priorities and that's the way it works and we haven't done that.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, that’s never how it works under a corrupt government, and Americans still haven’t gotten it between their thick ears that this government it totally corrupt. Poverty follows corruption, eventually, but thanks to the invention of debt, we have been able to prolong the pain. And the game we are playing here is a game of how much corruption is possible without wrecking our wealthy status? That’s the game. And by the time you figure out the answer, you’re too weak to fix it. Just ask any citizen of Argentina right now what that means and they can explain it to you. They fell on their face, and it hurt real, real bad, and their spending was not so different from ours.

JIM LEHRER: You can't blame it on anybody.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The blame game is to avoid thinking about how to fix things. Democrat, Republican, who cares. They are both literally the same. One is really bad. The other is really, really, really bad. So our choices are like the choices facing a typical voter in a third world country. You have to decide which sell-out crook is least damaging to your country. When life becomes a football game between two teams, there is always a third team called life’s reality, that is sneaking out the back of the stadium with the band and the pretty cheer leaders. So while we obsess over this imaginery game of Democrats versus Republicans, our wealth is disappearing to China.

JIM LEHRER: You said it a lot better than I did.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: That’s because if you said it like I did, you would be fired. Honesty is not very welcome on TV. None of this is really difficult for an intelligent person to figure out. But our leadership is so overconfident, so arrogant, and so ignorant, we have nobody nervous about anything. Listen, a good, responsible leader is always doubtful, nervous, cautious, and worried about the future, getting ready for the worst case. The stupid leader is the one who is overconfident, never worries, can’t imagine failure because he has never studied failure and how it happens. We can put Bush in that group, along with Jeffery Skilling. Warren Buffet has over $20 billon in cash resting in foreign currency. Could it be that the second richest man in the country is not very confident about the future of the US dollar? Who should guard your money? Bush or Buffet? Who has a better record, the overconfident dummy, or the skeptical genius?

DAVID BROOKS: I would put it a little differently. I think Republicans have in their minds we are the anti-government party. We came to shrink government. So they say that out on the campaign trail. But when you are the majority party actually governing, it doesn't work. People want the problem solved. So instead of having a governing philosophy that will tell them I'm going to spend it here but not there, they have a governing philosophy that is irrelevant to actually governing.
So they take that anti-governing philosophy and they just toss it out the window and when they get here and spend like sailors. So what you have is a governing philosophy that doesn't apply to the real world, so they have no sense of priorities, no sense of what's important and what's not, no sense of restraint and where to direct their effort.

JIM LEHRER: Well, that's the charges made of liberals all the time.

DAVID BROOKS: That's true. Well, there are two things to be said. One is -- one thing to be said -- because I can't think of the second (laughter) - the thing to be said and this thing that struck me throughout the whole period since Republicans took over, that being a majority party or minority party matters a lot more than being a Republican or a Democrat. If you are a majority party, you try to use dollars to buy votes regardless of what your official ideology is.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, when the other party had a President in the White House, our country had a surplus. And maybe it’s not about Democrat or Republican. Maybe it’s just about George Bush. I honestly think he’s a very dim guy. I can’t say Nixon was dim. In fact, Nixon, according to Noam Chomsky, was our last liberal president, by domestic standards. His social policies were far left wing by today’s standards. But the fact that Bush can break so many laws, with war and other crimes, and nothing happens, tells me our government is simply not prepared to deal with such incompetence in the White House. We have no safety mechanism to stop a nut, no matter how crazy, until his 8 years are up. It’s that simple.

JIM LEHRER: New subject: John Roberts, the vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, three Democrats decided to support him -- Leahy, Kohl and Feingold. What's the message there?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the message is they are either brave or they're setting themselves up to oppose the next nominee. Listen, I think this was a guy who was a great choice. And I think the reason a lot of Democrats voted against him because they're in the throe of their interest groups, Norman Lear took Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid aside and said how much they're against it and they voted no. And I think every party has to decide how much are we with the people who fund our party and how much are we not?
The Republicans to their credit when Judge Ginsburg was nominated, she was general counsel of the ACLU, she was definitely pro-choice, but she won confirmation ninety-six to three because the Republican senators decided, you know, we don't like her, but we are not going to kowtow to our interest groups who are calling for her head.
The Democrats didn't do that, and I think the reason they didn't do that or at least some of them didn't do it and I think the reason they didn't do it, because their donor base has decided if they shout louder and fight harder somehow that's going to be good for the party. I think it is just a mistake for the party and insult to the whole process.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The Democrats are spineless about actually stopping anything. The TV comedians get it. Rush Limbaugh says one thing correctly, and that is the Democrats don’t believe in themselves enough to stand up for anything. Well, that’s because they are not really liberals, as they are painted. They are really soft conservatives, most of them, which means they don’t have the intellect to even understand exactly why Roberts is a bad choice. Roberts is being used to play the Democrats just like they were played to sign on to the Iraq war. Since everything is image, and his hair was well combed, and his sentences well articulated, his image is perfect, therefore he must be perfect. But this guy is a well trained corporate puppy dog, where he might be all too willing to defend excessive executive power, since he worked for excessive executives for most of his career.

JIM LEHRER: Who is President Bush going to nominate for Sandra Day O'Connor's position, David?

DAVID BROOKS: Wish I knew.

JIM LEHRER: Just give me a name.

DAVID BROOKS: A name?

JIM LEHRER: I'll write it down right now.

DAVID BROOKS: Johnny Flatline I think is a possibility.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think this is going to cause the president to do, anything?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think the thinking beforehand was if they, if so many Democrats vote no, they will think, oh, well let's not even bother to win over those guys.
But I asked somebody today who is in a position to know if this, what happened to Roberts is affecting the -- what's the next pick and that person said, no, no effect. And then I said, well, who's it going to be, and they said there are a lot of good judges out there.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think Pat Leahy, who is the ranking Democratic member on the committee by voting for Roberts at least as an individual Democratic senator has earned the right to say Mr. President I want the Roberts standard?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Leahy is a power player. He didn’t get there by stirring up trouble. Since I consider this democracy dead, I really wish Bush would appoint people he really likes, who can't hide their views from the public - some real nuts like Ashcroft, or Priscilla Owen. We need to drop to the bottom of the ditch and give Americans what they deserve for voting in this miserable bastard. I would prefer instant harsh pain, so people will wake up to what is slowly being done by slight of hand to our country.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. We're going to leave it there. Thank you both very much.

Flatline and Brooks - September 19, 2005

JIM LEHRER: And some closing words tonight from Brooks and Flatline-New York Times columnist David Brooks and Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline. Mark Shields is off tonight. David, what do you make of the reaction to the President's speeches and plans, not only from officialdom from our program tonight and elsewhere.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, on the program tonight two people right here in the studio, a woman named Alison Fraser from the Heritage Foundation, who really was offering a sort of a traditional small government conservative vision of what should happen -- there should be tax relief, enterprise zones but not too much big government, $100 billion pouring in there. She was concerned about the spending. Sitting next to her was a guy named Bruce Katz from the Brookings Institution, a more liberal, or more democratic institution, and he was saying not enough, not enough spending, not enough emphasis on actually rebuilding communities.
And Bush, strangely enough finds himself in the middle of these two policies. He really from the beginning of presidency rejected the small government conservative policy partly because it is not politically doable in this country. People want the government to do stuff, and partly because he thinks the government should be active but not as active as Bruce Katz probably wants him to be.
So when you look at his speech and his programs, it is consistent with the philosophy he's tried to develop but has not quite gotten there, which is to spend a lot of money and to try to give individual initiative to actual people, not to government agencies, and if you look at the spending programs, that's what it is all about -- skipping the government agencies and then giving it right to individuals. And I spoke to a senior White House official today and he was trying to say we're just trying to work this through. There's tons of more stuff we haven't figured out. But the one good thing about this approach he said was that these governments tend to be corrupt. And if we just try to send money through governments down –

JIM LEHRER: Are you talking about local and state governments?

DAVID BROOKS: Right - it will never get there. And so they think this time you got to go straight to the people with these vouchers, with these training programs, with these Homestead Acts. If you go through normal government channels, it will never get to the people.

JIM LEHRER: And, of course, that is not consistent with the conservative view that she was saying; she was saying, hey, no big thing from the top. Go to the bottom.

DAVID BROOKS: And if you talk to a lot of conservatives on Capitol Hill and just around Washington anyway, they are upset. They think $100 billion, $200 billion. We have got no money. Where is this money coming from? To a lot of people this is big government - let go of big government conservatism -- and there's some truth in that.

JIM LEHRER: Where do you see the truths tonight?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I’m sorry, let me find my chair. Somebody mentioned corruption of small local government and I nearly lost it. Bush’s federal government has been the ultimate model of corruption, so I don’t see what gives him any credibility for policing honesty. As for taking money directly to the people who need it, that’s another hilarious concept. He’s been robbing the people and their grandkids who need it for years, and giving to rich people. I don’t see any difference here.

JIM LEHRER: It's stunning to hear that right now, isn't it, after all of these –

JOHNNY FLATLINE: That’s because the corruption is literally institutionalized now. Look, it was spelled out perfectly on a PBS report the other day. There are think tanks and lobby groups who plan their business strategies for taking my tax dollars. They plan these strategies years in advance. Then they simply wait for some trouble to come, like 911, or New Orleans. Then, in the middle of disaster, they quickly modify and adapt their plans to fit the panic. And since everybody in a panic, they can get just about anything past Congress, without anybody even reading what they wrote until it’s too late. This is our government now. There are already billion dollar contracts being written as we speak that will be available to Halliburton, or Fluor, entities like that. Meanwhile, Bush will promise millions, not billions, directly to the little guy, which sounds like a lot of money, but it isn’t. Anytime a federal politician uses the word million, it’s just a game, or maybe a personal bribe. But a million does not stand for significant help anymore. Billion is the big word of today. And billions are only handed off to big guys. That’s the reality.

JIM LEHRER: Right.

DAVID BROOKS: I don't quite agree with that. First of all, I agree totally that it's a start and everyone I talked to, even people close to the president said it's a start and we talked about things they have not even thought about -- or they thought about them but they haven't concluded about them -- family reunification, the offsets, which is the stuff to cut -- whether New Orleans should try to be a San Francisco-like creative city, a cultural city with a small growth area more like Portland or should it be a big booming city like Houston with big expansion and a lot of growth? So there's a lot of stuff out there and they are just walking along slowly.
But I do think two things need to be said. The first is the president didn't lay out a full program but he did lay out the costs. And that's unusual in politics. He said this is going to be a lot, a lot of money -- $100 billion, $200 billion. He laid out the cost, which is implies a lot more to come.
And, secondly, I don't think it is a mistake to be hesitant. Obviously there's immediate need that has to get there. I don't think it's a mistake to take our time and think even fundamentally if we really want to rebuild this city. I think all those issues have to be on the table, and if we take a couple of weeks to figure out how to rebuild the whole area, that doesn't seem to me a tragedy.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t think Bush got his job because he was able to plan ahead or control spending. The entire concept of Iraq was to get a guy in there like Bush who would nod to everything, and not be smart enough to say stop. That’s when our $50 billion dollar war turned into a $200 billion dollar war in a wink. There's nothing in Bush’s record that shows us any physical displine. He’s probably going to down in history as the biggest spending President in the history of our country.

JIM LEHRER: In other words, say we're going to spend a certain number of billion dollars, and that's it, and now let's figure out how to spend it?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Not going to happen. Hell, Congress tried to pass law to control their own spending, and that was a joke. Not going to happen.

JIM LEHRER: Okay.

JIM LEHRER: Let me ask you the question -- the three of us were sitting here last night when the president made this speech and one of the questions beyond the specifics, beyond the plan, beyond the cost, is did he make it -- did he take charge of it, 24 hours later is there now there a Bush idea, a Bush plan to do whatever needs to be done on the Gulf coast?

DAVID BROOKS: I think he did turn a corner. From everything I have heard it was a very well-received speech. People in the region, people around town, Republican and Democrat, seemed to say it was a good speech, even the editorial page praised him, which is not often for my paper's editorial page, so I do think it took us out of the hapless, I don't get it, problem which he had for a week or two, in to which I get it, we're working on ideas, we're taking charge; we've committed a lot of money to this; we're going to solve it. That doesn't mean, as Johnny and I were saying, he knows exactly what he's going to do, but that's fair. I think he turned the corner with the speech.

JIM LEHRER: He is in charge?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Words don’t mean much in politics anymore. I could say his words were nice, but following the money trail is reality, and I don’t see any way Bush would even begin to know how to control that. He’s the puppet. The real spenders are hiding in the background.

JIM LEHRER: David, would you mind - (Laughter)

DAVID BROOKS: It is not that easy to get these people on the phone.

JIM LEHRER: But you think he’s just lost?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Like a rock in space.

JIM LEHRER: It is not enough to say we will do it and cabinet officers are going to do –

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Taking charge is a concept lost by these neocons. They see leadership the way a dictator see it. As centralized control. Every large country in the history of the world who has tried this approach has finished weak. You disperse the power, and simply try to control the integrity of the system. In other words, you police corruption. As I understand it, FDR policed the hell out of his big spending, to make sure corruption didn’t get their greedy hands on it. We have no such thing today. We police by tragedy. When Enron stole too much, they collapsed. That’s our modern method for policing theft.

JIM LEHRER: We also spent some time together this week with the John Roberts hearings. What are your thoughts about that? There is going to be a vote next Thursday. Was that -- was the exercise of the hearings good for our democratic society?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, my thoughts were quite along that line. You look back on the whole week. If you were a Martian that came to Earth, you would think the United States had a functioning democracy. You don't often get that impression. We had a guy come up, a nominee. He was a fantastic witness. He spoke clearly. He explained things as I think as clearly as he could have. Then we had the committee and the risk of these things turning into a fiasco is more likely to be on the Senate side than on the nominee side. And as I look at the members of the committee I see a lot of them who performed very well. Chuck Schumer from New York, who can be quite partisan, I thought the week was quite serious; Russ Feingold who can, you know, who pressed the case, the critical case quite seriously; Sam Brownback from Kansas made the pro-life case quite seriously. I thought we had a number of senators -- Arlen Specter, above all, the chairman, who ran a very fair hearing. A number of people stepped up and it was quite a good exercise all in all.

JIM LEHRER: Good exercise?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh please. This is exactly why Democrats are the fake enemies of the Republican party. Look, both parties put this country in a war it should not be in. Both parties voted in Scalia 97-0. Not a single vote against him. And look at the nut case he’s been. There is no such thing as a Senate hearing. This is a dog and pony show. Image is everything, substance is literally forbiddin. It's embarrassing for any thinking person to watch.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of wrestling. Do you all find it -- is this not an extraordinary time? We not only have the selection of a person who could, for 40 years, hold one of the top positions, some people, they say could even affect our way of life, the chief justice and we have this extraordinary devastation and rebuilding now in the Gulf, and we also have a war going on in Iraq -- 200 Iraqis have died this week; 600 have been wounded.

DAVID BROOKS: And the president met with Vladimir Putin, who is in town. You think of American Soviet summits, the way they used to be so big.

JIM LEHRER: He kind of slipped in and out.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Huge Chavez came here. Hmm. I didn’t see his name on the front page of any paper. And you guys didn’t think to invite him on today. What a shame. I'll bet he would have been more than happy to come on your show.

JIM LEHRER: I . . . I’m speechless on that one Johnny. Thank you both very much. It's been an interesting week.

Flatline & Brooks - September 9, 2005

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Brooks and Flatline-- New York Times columnist David Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline.
Johnny, what would you add to what Andy said about his numbers?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I’ve always been harsh on that 60% of America that has been so gullible as to ever believe in Bush. But I also know that part of the faith that these people live by is due to the incredibly effective brainwashing our power structure is able to pull off through it’s tacit control of the media. They can promote guys like David Brooks here to a high position of power, and make sure his version of nonreality stays center stage. Then they promote guys who claim to be left wing, who really aren’t, while keeping the real left wingers like me off the air completely.

I was amazed to see Bush get re-elected after so many failures, and when he did get elected, I lost all faith in our country because I knew the only way this could possibly happen is if our democracy was a complete wreck. And it is. But New Orleans is significant because the failures were so fast, and so public, and so connected to our citizens, that the administration simply didn’t have time to create some effective lies to insulate themselves from it. They were stuck with reality. And reality is the one thing incompetent leadership cannot always beat. For five years they have managed to keep reality away from a majority of Americans. But not so while an American city was removed from the map with no terrorist to blame. With a complete majority, it’s getting hard for Republicans to blame anybody, which is exactly why there is so much criticism of the blame game. Oh, let’s please stop blaming things and pointing fingers. That is so unfair. So unproductive. The American people won't like that. Oh, boo hoo.

JIM LEHRER: And this was a sharp plunge.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: What he finally deserves.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah, yeah –

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Feels good. We can only hope people will grow more skeptical as they try to wiggle out of this one. And the wiggle has already begun.

JIM LEHRER: Not only the Bush numbers, David, but generally speaking what did you think of what Andy's numbers showed?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, my first reaction was that there are a lot of people like me -- that is good, I guess, for the country, yes, oh yes -- people who support Bush generally but who are angry with him now.

I actually think he may be able to come up again. I mean President Reagan in '82/'83 was way low, 20s and 30s. Carter, Clinton went way up and down in the way this president hasn't. But the crucial question to me is something frankly I'm not quite clear sure about, do, -- you know we're in an emotional period, a passionate period and things are going to be moving around.
Do, in two months, -- do we snap back to essentially the political structure of the past six years, really, which is this big hunk of Republicans, this big hunk of Democrats and very few people in the middle -- in other words, the polarization that we've seen - and if that is the case than the parties will continue to play their base -- or has something fundamentally reshaped and we really begin to see a center?

I begin to think that something has been fundamentally reshaped. That is my instinct but so far you wouldn't say there is a lot of evidence for that.

JIM LEHRER: David, you don't find any evidence of that in what Andy's turned up?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I mean, when I look at what has happened with Iraq and with this, what I see is people flaking off from Bush because of Iraq and because of this but not going over to the Democrats. The ratings for the Democrats has not risen. So they are sort of stuck there in the middle.

JIM LEHRER: The readings for all, Andy said also, as well as Ray said in the introduction, the ratings for everybody are down -- not just Bush.

DAVID BROOKS: And that is why I think it is a bit like the '70s when you saw a massive erosion of faith in institutions across all sorts of institutions, the media, the governments, the military, even. And I think we are seeing a little of that too.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Perhaps that erosion in faith is just catching up with the 40% of us who knew all along there was no faith left to have. I mean, name a single success Bush has had since taking office, other than rigging elections. Theirs is nothing there but one failure after another. And people just keep taking it with a stupid grin, because they are worried about gay marriage, or they think this is some football game where you back your team no matter what.

JIM LEHRER: What about -- we had Sen. Collins and Lieberman on this program last night and they discussed this idea of how the American public is going to view how Congress is handling whether or not to have a joint committee to investigate this or not, the Democrats saying they are not going to participate.

There is a story today that Congressman Davis, Republican, has his own committee. He's going to go ahead and have his own hearing. Sen. Collins, Sen. Lieberman are going to go ahead and have their committee. How do you think that is going to affect opinions about Congress?

DAVID BROOKS: Hey, get out of nursery school, boys and girls. No, you have got a catastrophe like this and they are squabbling. I think that will be the reaction. You know, as we say, institutions got hit after hit.

To me one of the most damaging things I've done this week is read through the New Orleans preparations for what was going on -- the plan that they set out where you had agency after agency specifically designing responses to this sort of event, and those responses on the first crush of reality were blown away.

So how can you not lose faith in an institution, whether it is local government, federal government or Congress? That is happening.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think about what Congress has done so far just as -- on the hurricane reaction?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t think Congress ever thinks. Congress has lost its ability to think because all thinkers have been filtered out of the system. What we have are a bunch of puppets waiting for corporate America to tell them what to think. That’s what they do. If they did any thinking, they would lose their jobs.

JIM LEHRER: And who knows what it will be next week and the week after.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Money will be spent. On who is a good question. Lots of money will be spent, and the dollar will go back to dropping, I suppose, because the budget is surely ripped to shreds now. Bush was never the kind of President who could get the country ready for a rainy day – no pun intended.

JIM LEHRER: In other words, just go ahead and say how big it is. Just go say right now how big it is.

DAVID BROOKS: Right now, you know, to me just the underlying thing that happened because of Katrina, is that the disaster has shown us how much we need government. It's also shown us how ineffective government can be. And we're –

JIM LEHRER: That is a bad combination.

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, it is.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of government, et cetera, do you have any thoughts about bringing Michael Brown back to Washington to run FEMA?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, you know, I guess they found somebody from the thoroughbred association they could put in his place. No, I -- he was just as ineffective and hapless. I begin to get a little cautious because of the piling on.

There is sort of a jackal-like mentality - the poor guy -- he shouldn't have been in the job. He should get out. But there is sort of a going after his past, what he promised to do in college, you know, okay fine, he's gone.

To me the crucial thing again and I mentioned this the other day, people in New Orleans, and Louisiana and the federal government were for ten years holding commissions, conferences working groups on how to prepare for this. These people were experts. Forget Michael Brown.
These people -- this was the most anticipated natural disaster in American history. And we still had a failure. So you didn't have to be a tyro or a beginner to fail. A lot of people failed who knew a lot about what they should have been doing. And maybe it is just the nature of government. Maybe it is the nature of natural disasters but people with experience didn't do great either.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: See how subtle Brooks is at diverting attention from the real problem by focusing on the whole instead of the parts. This is Carl Rove strategy beautifully executed. He is really brilliant.
Our entire government has become over-run by nepotist insiders. This isn’t about a lack of experience. This is about a government that no longer looks for the best and brightest for any top position. Every position is a gift to a buddy for a favor. Therefore, the performance in a time of need is no different than we would expect from some corrupt two-bit country. This is how much of the world lives. We are becoming the same.

DAVID BROOKS: You've got bureaucracy, you know, it is just not fast. The other thing you've got is democracy. We have in a system of power, separation of powers. We diffuse authority; that's why we don't have a dictator. The downside of that is you get fights over the Army Corps of Engineers, what they should be spending their money on; you get fights over the 82nd Airborne versus the National Guard, who should going in there.

You get diffusion of power and that makes a fast response impossible as well.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, this is not about the inefficiencies of democracy. That’s a Bushism, again, snuck in by David as if we are not supposed to notice. It is more accurate to say it’s about corrupt competition for leadership. This is about the destruction of democracy, the lack of democracy. It’s centralization of power under inept people that has made the machine start to freeze up. A group of idiots will fail. And group of wise, uncorrupted competent people, selected by proper credentials and competition makes things work. This entire vocabulary is extinct in Washington.

FEMA leadership was chosen by people who assisted Bush’s campaign. FEMA is a microcosm of our entire government. Many of the people are probably great down below. But that doesn’t matter because the leadership is rotten. There were lower ranking FEMA people with the exerpience to know failure was coming. They knew Bush gutted their departments. They knew they were not prepared. They could only assume their guys in command also knew. But clearly, they didn't. The most surprised people were the ones in charge - the ones appointed to power without proper credentials, just like our President.

JIM LEHRER: I thought a dozen years ago the essence of the reform in the government was that there was an agency created and given the authority to coordinate everybody else during an emergency. And that reform was allowed to lapse and at a minimum --

JIM LEHRER: And that was FEMA.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I’ve seen Bush fire other people when he gets in trouble. Or wait, he doesn’t fire people, because he never makes a mistake. They resign, and he replaces them. That’s the way you do things in a dictatorship.

JIM LEHRER: Meanwhile, I can't imagine how much time we have devoted to a discussion of the oncoming confirmation hearings of the chief justice of the Supreme Court if Katrina had not come along. Those hearings do begin on Monday. They begin at noon. We are going to be broadcasting them live on most PBS stations, the two of you are going to be there along with Marcia Coyle for commentary and whatever.

Do either of you have any reason to believe there is going to be -- is there any -- are there any fireworks coming -- anything that we should be looking for that we don't know about?

DAVID BROOKS: This not the way to build ratings. But no, I don't think so. I think the chance of him getting confirmed went from 95 percent to 99 percent, because, a, there is just no public energy for a big fight about that because Katrina is so dominant. Secondly, because there are now two openings on the court I think the Democrats are going to shift their focus on the other opening.

JIM LEHRER: Let Roberts go, do you agree?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I have never seen the Democrats really fight for anything. If they start now, it will be a first.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you, Johnny. But you're not able –

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I’ve never seen a justice hearing pose any tough questions, except maybe for Judge Bork. We got lucky that time when a real nut case was put before them. But as you can see by Scalia and Thomas, we are usually unlucky in stopping gross incompetence from getting in there.

JIM LEHRER: But that is going to be really exciting watching that next week right, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: About as suspenseful as a rigged Ohio voting district.

JIM LEHRER: Absolutely. Well, I'll see you next week, and thank you both very much for tonight.

Flatline and Brooks - September 2, 2005

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Brooks and Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks, Fake Democracy Foundation founder Johnny Flatline.

JIM LEHRER: David you said in a column this week that natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, exposed the basic fault lines in American society. Your thesis, please sir?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, what you get is you get these meteorological storms and then these political storms because in the moment of extremes people see who's up and who's down, who's at fault and who is suffering. So, for example in 1897 there was the famous Johnstown Flood, a pond owned by millionaires including Andrew Carnegie flooded the town of Johnstown. The public anger over that helped spawn the Progressive Movement.
Then in 1927 you had the great Mississippi Flood, which flooded New Orleans. And there you have first of all, you had great demand for the government to get involved in disaster relief which had not happened much before then. And that helped lead the way to the New Deal. You also had the situation where the town fathers flooded some of the poorer and middle class areas to relieve some of the pressure on the rest of the city and then reneged on their promises for compensation for the people who had their homes destroyed. The anger over that helped lead to the rise of Huey Long, the populist governor.
So what you get is this moment of extremes, people see the power inequalities, the poor suffering, the rich benefiting and then they react. And so you get these political reactions.

JIM LEHRER: And okay, now, move it to Hurricane Katrina and what we are seeing down there now.

DAVID BROOKS: I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield.
So there is just -- in 9/11 you had a great surge of public confidence. Now I think we are going to see a great decline in public confidence in our institutions. And so I just think this is sort of the anti-9/11 as one of the bloggers wrote.

JIM LEHRER: What would you add to that, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t think the anger here is based on success or failure. We all suffer accidents, death and failure every day. What happened here, that crossed the line, was seeing tragedy develop, day by day, on our TV screens, with clearly nobody making an honest or intelligent effort to try to stop it. Had we sent 100,000 National Guard troops to New Orleans within 24 hours, and let’s say they got trapped on the edge of the city due to impassable water. That could be forgiven. To try and fail is not a sin. To fail to even try is incompetence.

JIM LEHRER: Wow.

JIM LEHRER: And you think, David, they will think about them, not just about those folks in New Orleans but the whole country now? You think that's a possibility that this has exposed more than just New Orleans?

DAVID BROOKS: This is -- first of all it is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city. But second, you have to remember, this was really a de-legitimization of institutions.

Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years -- this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.

We have had over the past four or five years a whole series of scandals that soured the public mood. You've seen a rise in feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
And I think this is the biggest one and the bursting one, and I must say personally it is the one that really says hey, it feels like the 70s now where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let's get out of this mess. And I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just people are sick of it.

JOHHNY FLATLINE: Part of the function of a representative democracy is to have somebody to blame if things are not going well. It’s not easy to blame a bureaucracy for something, because it’s not something we can put our hands on. The face of a President, for example, is somebody who has a certain amount of managerial control over these big whales. Whatever is wrong with the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Army Core of Engineers, or Iraq, is his. He owns it. And since he has spent quite a bit of time relaxing and vacationing, I figure he must think everything is in pretty hunky dory condition right now, from an institutional perspective. If these institutions have so many problems, then surely Bush would have had some work to do, rather than doing yard work or playing golf. He has taken such a beating on this, I'm guessing we will see some different images this week, designed to save face.

The tragedy in New Orleans accelerated events, because the TV cameras couldn’t be diverted, and Bush couldn’t hide, or be trained on what to say. And whenever the public gets to see the real George Bush, speaking off the cuff, it’s often not a real pretty sight. It was really sad to see how unfocused he was on human tragedy, at the very moment when that should have been the only priority of our entire government. Clearly, he had no clue how to behave in this situation. And God only knows what the final body count is really going to be.

JIM LEHRER: I just dread that moment. Don't you dread that bulletin, when it's going to come on the wires?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Right. A city has practically been removed from the map. And I’m not sure George Bush was completely cognizant of that. Any Texan should remember what happened to Galveston at the turn of the century. Before, it was a city bigger than Houston. Today, Baton Rouge is the largest city in Louisiana. That’s a stunning fact that will likely be permanent.

JIM LEHRER: And find new lives for all these people who are not going to come back.

DAVID BROOKS: But to reiterate the point I made earlier, which is this is the anti-9/11, just in terms of public confidence, when 9/11 happened Giuliani was right there and just as a public presence, forceful -- no public presence like that now. So you have had a surge of strength, people felt good about the country even though we had been hit on 9/11.
Now we've been hit again in a different way; people feel lousy; people feel ashamed and part of that is because of the public presentation. In part that is because of the failure of Bush to understand immediately the shame people felt.

Sitting up there on the airplane and looking out the window was terrible. And the three days of doing nothing, really, on Bush was terrible. And even today, I found myself, as you know, I support his politics quite often.

JIM LEHRER: Sure.

DAVID BROOKS: Look at him today earlier in the program, this is how Mark Shields must feel looking at him, I'm angry at the guy and maybe it will pass for me. But a lot of people and a lot of Republicans are furious right now.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: You have to know the President screwed up really, really, really bad. He screwed up so bad, that even David Brooks can’t back him, and that is really something. As for the institutional response, the funny thing is, we just reorganized how all of these institutions were going to work together under the establishment of Homeland Security. All of that effort was sold to the American public as a way to make us more prepared for tragedy, not less prepared.

Now, we are witnessing institutions acting even more lost than before, not in communication with each other, with state government not having a clue what the federal government is up to. We did a similar thing to our national intelligence, by setting up a director of intelligence who has more clout and access to the President than even the head of the CIA. In light of this, one has to wonder if any of these changes were really an improvement. Or was this just something to write about in the newspaper, to feign progress?

DAVID BROOKS: The other issue is why are there so many poor people in New Orleans, why is Raleigh booming, why is Houston booming, why is Atlanta booming but New Orleans has not boomed? And in part, it's because of the corruption of the government that has been part of the charming New Orleans for decades.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I’m not sure what any corruption of New Orleans’ local government has to do with the National Guard showing up to establish order. I’m not sure what that has to do with how well FEMA responds to saving lives. I believe it was Bush who cut funding on the repair of those levees. That was funding requested by those you accuse of being corrupt. How do we measure that corruption? I think we could try flooding any American city with 8 feet of water, and see pretty much the same problem we have here now. Shame on you for saying that New Orleans’s own poverty is part of the problem why the federal government can’t properly save lives.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah, I want to pick up on something about the shame that people felt in looking at these pictures and saying, you know this is in New Orleans, Louisiana, the United States of America.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I’ve been ashamed of many things I’ve seen the past 5 years. I’m ashamed of us attacking a country for no honest reason. I’m ashamed to know we torture people, and hide them in secret prisons with no legal recourse. I’m ashamed of our lack of corporate governance and how that has cost the American people. I’m ashamed of how the resources and financial wealth of this great country are being squandered. I’m ashamed of our highly discriminatory health care system. And I’m ashamed at how we have neglected this country’s infrastructure. Whenever you do that, you eventually suffer something catastrophic.

Now, we’ve seen a classic example. This problem with the levees was completely avoidable. But we have become so focused on war, generating tons of fear about terrorism, and now look. This hurricane, like other natural disasters of the past year, has been far more deadly than any terrorists. The government leadership has always had its priorities wrong. I’m not sure that will ever change unless the American people can start thinking more critically, and realize what really matters here. New Orleans matters. That’s what really matters to the United States. Not Baghdad. Which city do you want to rebuild? Bagdad or New Orleans? We are spending $300 billion on Baghdad. How much will be spend on New Orleans with this debt ridden government of ours?

JIM LEHRER: Okay. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you all very much.