Trustiness

An editorial in the NYT, The Trust Gap, enumerates a number of reasons why the Bush Administration does not deserve the "trust" of the County. Domestic Spying. The Prison Camps. The War in Iraq. The list could go on. And on. As the Times put it:

We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time.

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Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.