It’s been a hard five years, folks, and there’s more hard times ahead. But today let’s take a moment to enjoy a delicious, self-gratifying wallow in I told you so.

Paul Krugman kicks off the wallow:

Bruce Bartlett, the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is “unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “vindictive” and “inept.”

It’s no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that “if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears.”

Oh, wait. That’s not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It’s what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he’s saying now.

Heh.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Mr. Bartlett’s book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration’s fiscal policy. Well, the administration’s pattern of fiscal dishonesty and irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who understands budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the selling of the 2001 tax cut — obviously fraudulent budget projections, transparently deceptive advertising about who would benefit and the use of blatant accounting gimmicks to conceal the plan’s true cost — was as bad as anything that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before the war — and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that stampeded Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The administration’s nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq and 9/11 was also a dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an unnecessary war.

Some are not giving up on the Iraq-9/11 connection. Recently Michael Barone published an utterly nonsensical screed in which he blasts people who hold the view “with religious intensity” that there was no Iraq-9/11 connection. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he thunders. “We do not know that there was such collaboration. But we also do not know that there was not.”

So let’s get this straight. Barone admits that no evidence has come to light that Saddam Hussein had any connection to 9/11. He admits the 9/11 commission found no evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. There is documentation — which Barone doesn’t mention — that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden never liked or trusted each other, but leave that aside. Barone’s point seems to be that people who don’t believe in a 9/11-Saddam Hussein connection — because we have no evidence to support it — are being irrational, or else are trying “to delegitimize our war effort.” Those who hang on to their belief in such a connection in the absence of evidence are smart.

OK.

Krugman points out another cognitive anomaly:

… we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there’s something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush’s deceptions, even though the administration’s mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you’re a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that “the administration lies about budget numbers,” you’re a brave truth-teller. But if you’ve been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you’re a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that “the people in this administration have no principles,” you’re taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

This isn’t just a right-wing phenomenon, of course. A lot of liberal bloggers and Democrats who originally had supported the invasion of Iraq still seem to think they are “smarter” on security issues than those of us who saw what a sham it was from the beginning. Go figure.

Dear former hawks: I told you so.

At the Washington Post, Peter Baker writes that the rats are deserting the ship.

“He has no political capital,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. “Slowly but surely it’s been unraveling. There’s been a direct correlation between the trajectory of his approval numbers and the — I don’t want to call it disloyalty — the independence on the part of the Republicans in Congress.”

We don’t want to call it disloyalty. No, no, no. Loyalty is more important than responsibility to the Right. Let’s call it we don’t want to be tied to this loser when the mid-term election campaigns heat up.

You know something significant is happening when even David Broder notices it.

… the [Dubai port] conflict brought to the surface deep-seated resentments from the Capitol end of Pennsylvania Avenue toward the people around the president — and, surprisingly, toward Bush himself. The harmony that had prevailed during most of Bush’s tenure — the deference that a Republican-controlled Congress has generally shown to his wishes — disappeared. Even the normal circumspection with which congressional Republicans treat the White House withered in the unexpected heat of this dispute.

Broder goes on to wag a finger at Democrats — “Liberals such as Schumer” — for “playing with fire” by trying to “stoke the fever” of “nativist sentiment.” Which of course (cough) Republicans would never do (snort). I think some people have some catching up to do.

But the American People are finally seeing the light. Ron Fournier of the Associated Press writes today that large numbers of Americans are so disillusioned of Bush they might consider voting for Democrats. Wow.

More and more people, particularly Republicans, disapprove of President Bush’s performance, question his character and no longer consider him a strong leader against terrorism, according to an AP-Ipsos poll documenting one of the bleakest points of his presidency. …

… “I’m not happy with how things are going,” said Margaret Campanelli, a retiree in Norwich, Conn., who said she tends to vote Republican. “I’m particularly not happy with Iraq, not happy with how things worked with Hurricane Katrina.” …

… The poll suggests that most Americans wonder whether Bush is up to the job. … Personally, far fewer Americans consider Bush likable, honest, strong and dependable than they did just after his re-election campaign.

Dear American People: I told you so.

In Matthew 7:15-20 Jesus explains how to sort true from false prophets. “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves,” Jesus said. “By their fruits you will know them. Do you gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree produces good fruit; but the corrupt tree produces evil fruit. A good tree can’t produce evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree produce good fruit. Every tree that doesn’t grow good fruit is cut down, and thrown into the fire. Therefore, by their fruits you will know them.”

I’ve always thought this to be good advice that can be applied to many circumstances — judge people not by what they promise, but by what they accomplish. We might assume, for example, that we can judge the quality of a leader by looking at the results of his leadership. That seems basic. Yet there are always people who can”t see past the image, the persona, and the promise, and who will follow a genuinely bad leader off a cliff.

Take New Orleans. A few days ago a video made pre-Katrina came to light, and in it the President exhibited all the leadership qualities of soggy toast. The Right came to Bush’s defense, saying that it’s wrong to judge an entire presidency by one video. And they are right. If it were just one video, I’d say, ignore it.

But it isn’t just one video, is it? Sidney Blumenthal writes in today’s Guardian,

In New Orleans, a sad Mardi Gras has come and gone, while crews from the morgue continue searching for bodies – still finding them. The city has lost more than half its population, most of the refugees are African-Americans, and their neighbourhoods remain scenes of devastation. Having rejected a plan for rebuilding, Bush travelled to New Orleans for another photo-opportunity this week to announce a programme that would supposedly give money to the homeless but absurdly will not permit destroyed housing to be replaced by new. Not one penny so far has been spent on new homes. Six months after the tempest, New Orleans, one of the glories of American life and culture, lies in ruins, and Bush visits to pose as visionary.

Even more pathetic, yesterday the Weenie-in-Chief blamed Congress for the sluggish response. As Glenn Greenwald said — conservative belief in “personal responsibility” is so over.

This Associated Press story from February 25 describes the fruits of George Bush’s leadership:

Leave the French Quarter on Rampart and head east, toward the devastated Ninth and Lower Ninth wards and East New Orleans.

All around are the carcasses of flooded houses. Katrina laid waste to more than 215,000 homes. Many are abandoned, their doors wide open.

Only an estimated 189,000 of the city’s roughly 500,000 pre-Katrina residents have returned. For now, the city is overwhelmingly whiter and more affluent than it was before.

Affordable housing is scarce, and FEMA has only filled 48,158 of the 90,000 trailer requests it’s received from displaced families in Louisiana, leaving many to wait out their existence in places like Atlanta, Houston and Little Rock. With only 20 of 128 public schools now open, parents who can’t afford to send their children to private schools have no choice but to live elsewhere.

Children who have returned must wade through wreckage to get to school. “You never really get used to it,” said 18-year-old Mark Buchert, a senior at Brother Martin, an all-boys Catholic high school in the devastated Gentilly neighborhood.

The destruction gets worse. Keep driving as Rampart turns into St. Claude Avenue and you’ll go six miles before you pass a working traffic light. Broken signals swing from their poles like men hanging from gallows. Others blink red. Elsewhere, they lie on their side in intersections, blinking yellow. …

… At night, the darkness is pervasive. Six months after the storm made landfall Aug. 29, a little over a third of the structures in the city have electricity. Even fewer have hot water or cooking gas.

This situation is not just the fault of the federal government; state and local government don’t seem to be terribly functional, either. But Louisiana is a poor state with limited resources. This is a situation that cries out for someone to step in and take charge; someone who can marshal the resources of the nation and send them where they are desperately needed.

And normally that someone would be the President of the United States. I’m not saying the POTUS should personally fill out requisitions and inspect street lamps. But he should be following up, rattling cages, lighting fires, busting heads, and making things happen.

Instead, as the hurricane hit, Bush called the head of Homeland Security to talk about immigration, then went to a birthday party. The next day, Bush gave a speech on Iraq at a California naval base and later played with a borrowed guitar. The day after that, as conditions in New Orleans deteriorated, Bush promised to work with a task force to coordinate reief efforts. Finally, four days after Katrina made landfall, Bush’s aides had him watch a DVD of television news reports so that he would understand how bad the situation was. They had to stage an intervention, because the President had done nothing to learn on his own.

It isn’t just one video. And the whole world was watching.

And it isn’t just New Orleans. Google “Bush incompetence” and you’ll get a fruitbasket of hits. Some of you may remember the Harold Meyerson column of January 25 —

In numbing profusion, the newspapers are filled with litanies of screw-ups. Yesterday’s New York Times brought news of the first official assessment of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq, in which the government’s special inspector general depicted a policy beset, as Times reporter James Glanz put it, “by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting [and] secrecy.” At one point, rebuilding efforts were divided, bewilderingly and counterproductively, between the Army Corps of Engineers and, for projects involving water, the Navy. That’s when you’d think a president would make clear in no uncertain terms that bureaucratic turf battles would not be allowed to impede Iraq’s reconstruction. But then, the president had no guiding vision for how to rebuild Iraq — indeed, he went to war believing that such an undertaking really wouldn’t require much in the way of American treasure and American lives.

Meyerson goes on to discuss what he calls Bush’s most “mind-boggling failure” — the Medicare prescription drug plan. Personally, I don’t think any failure can beat Iraq. But there’s so much more — plutonium processing in North Korea, an out-of-control budget deficit, the failure to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, the failure to follow through on basic homeland security measures — in fact, is there anything this Administration has done that’s been a success?

Yesterday saw another staged Bush “event” in New Orleans, in which the President was photographed in rolled-up sleeves shaking hands with contractors in hard hats. He certainly knows how to look like a leader. But while the President who claims to be a “problem-solver” whines that the problems with recovery efforts in New Orleans are Congress’s fault, we might ask what Bush has done in the past six months to get Congress to act. Bush’s endless series of disaster relief photo ops may have some entertainment value, but they aren’t picking up the debris or rebuilding the homes.

“The corrupt tree produces evil fruit,” Jesus said. Too true.