Tom Engelhart's report on the status of the Bush Administration starts with the poll numbers, then works its way through various piles of dirty laundry. Amidst all this, one paragraph strikes me as getting especially close to the heart of the matter:

What makes the last few years so strange is that this administration has essentially been losing its campaigns, at home and abroad, to nobody. What comes to mind is the famous phrase of cartoonist Walt Kelly's character, Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps it's simply the case that -- in Rumsfeldian terms -- it's hard for people with the mentality of looters to create a permanent edifice, even when they set their minds to it.

The most suggestive word there is that nobody. Time and again Bush has been able to act with little opposition and scrutiny, yet still the policies crumple under the dead weight of their bad design, or more pointedly their ill intentions. The other word to note is looters. They seek to strip the government of its mandate to serve and protect any sort of public interest. They do this directly by curtailing government, indirectly by undermining the tax base, and nefariously by turning into a monster of war and inequity. They understand that their acts are unpopular, so as much as possible they work in secret, and they cover their tracks with lies and innuendo.

The puzzling thing about the Bush-Cheney Administration isn't that ordinary befuddled white folks fall for their manipulations, but that the rich do. Sure, some obviously profit from the loot -- the oil industry, defense contractors, a few others -- but most businesses don't benefit from war, few benefit from the sinking dollar or the negative savings rate or the increased exposure to risk both natural and man-made.

Speaking of looting, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the following in the Apr. 20, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone:

Gale Norton stepped down as Secretary of the Interior on March 31st, ending her ferocious five-year assault on the lands and wildlife she was charged to protect. A former lobbyist and lawyer for the mining and timber industries, Norton made it her goal as secretary to give away as many of our publicly owned resources as she could to the energy, timber and mining interests, often for free or at fire-sale prices. She opened tens of millions of acres of key wildlife habitat to oil and gas tycoons, industrial logging barons and reckless developers. She blocked hard-won plans to control the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park and campaigned tirelessly to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. She suppressed dozens ofscientific studies and punished scientists when their findings challenged corporate profit-taking. She put polluters and their lobbyists in charge of virtually all of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from polluters. She even refused to reprimand her deputy, the former mining and oil lobbyist Steven Griles, after an investigation by the Interior Department's inspector general found that he had doled out multimillion-dollar favors to his former clients.

Now that she is leaving, Norton says she is setting her sights on "the private sector." Her record suggests she has been working for the private sector all along.

It's hard to recall anything that the Bush-Cheney Administration has done that won't have to be undone once sanity returns. Not that it's all that clear that sanity will return. But experience has shown that trends that can't be sustained indefinitely won't be. Bush has kept his political juggernaut afloat by converting public assets into private favors. Those assets are finite.