Just Like His College Report Card

17 D's and/or F's:

The members of the Sept. 11 commission gave dismal grades to the Bush administration and Congress on Monday in measuring the government's recent efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on American soil, concluding that the government deserved many more F's and D's than A's...

"While the terrorists are learning and adopting, our government is still moving at a crawl," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey. "Many obvious steps that the American people assume have been completed have not been. Our leadership is distracted."

The new report by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a private group established by the commission's five Republicans and five Democrats when the panel formally went out of business last year, graded the government's response to the 41 recommendations made in the commission's final report 17 months ago.

There were 17 F's or D's - including an F to Congress for its failure to allocate the domestic antiterrorism budget on the basis of risk and a D for the government's effort to track down and secure nuclear material that could be used by terrorists. There was only one A - and it was an A minus - awarded for the government's efforts to stem the financing of terrorist networks.

With the release of the report, the commissioners announced that they were shutting down the Public Discourse Project, which had represented an unusual private effort by members of a federal commission to retain some political viability and lobby for their recommendations.

The White House, which often tangled with the Sept. 11 commission during its official investigation, defended its performance in dealing with terrorist threats, insisting it had acted on most of the panel's recommendations.

I hope nobody's surprised--after all, the "security" administration couldn't handle the response to this season's hurricanes...which, as disasters go, at least have some degree of predictability. But the failing grades also are a genuine reflection of George W. Bush the person: his ENTIRE LIFE STORY has been one of lurching from one failure to another. I can't fathom why anyone would think things would be different now.

His daddy's rich friends will probably bail him out of this one too--but the entire country will be on the losing end, not just a group of investors willing to take a bath for access.