Roe versus Wade? Bush says he doesn't care how people got out of New Orleans

That joke from my sister sums up how an increasing number of people view George Bush -- as clueless, indifferent, incurious and over (as in "put a fork in him, he's over").

Columnist E. J. Dionne of the influential Washington Post this week announces the Bush era is over

. Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal says in Salon, "Bush's America is gone with the wind," while the headline screams that Bush's presidency is ruined.

Bush lovers will argue that these are people who never thought much of Bush in the first place. But the difference now is that the press no longer hesitates for fear of being called unpatriotic. News organizations have regained their voice and are willing to criticize this group of ideological kleptocrats for what they are -- radicals who line their own pockets with your money.

The rebuilding after Katrina shows the Bush folks for who and what they are. They don't give a damn for the folks abandoned at the SuperDome or the Convention Center, as evidenced by the fact that Bush immediately lifted the Davis-Bacon requirement to pay prevailing wages from all those new contracts. And Halliburton, of course, gets first dibs, even after whistleblower Bunnatine Greenhouse of the Army Corps of Engineers was demoted for telling us how badly Halliburton performed in the rebuilding or Iraq.

This is cronyism of the highest order. It is also part of that privitization ideology that means workers get screwed so that owners can make higher profits, cloaked in the argument that we must create a business-friendly climate of competition. Do you know any competitors for corporations are large as Halliburton and Bechtel that aren't equally as corrupt and incompetent?

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins blows the whistle on the work he used to do -- selling economic development to Third World countries that did nothing but enrich the Halliburton and Bechtel corporations, while leaving the impoverished countries with a massive debt and dubious projects. These policies not only do nothing to alleviate poverty, they add to it. Sound familiar?