Thanks for another good bookmark, Tom. Sounds like you've been holding out on us, posting about the whackiest stuff you find, but keeping quiet when you find "a fairly reasonable and intelligent leftist". I like what I've seen so far of Kevin Drum's writing.
The site has a great essay titled "Why Conservatives Can't Govern". The thesis is based on common sense: People who hate government will produce incompetent government when they're in power.
It's a fine Catch-22: When Republicans take power the mechanism by which they exercize power is through the government they're now running, thus they can hardly honor their rhetoric and shrink it--that would diminish Conservative power! You guys really have your parts caught in a wringer with that stuff.
But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions--indeed, whose very existence--they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.
The essay only briefly touched on Michael Brown, but his case is a nice illustration of the problem. FEMA had been thoroughly reformed under Clinton and emerged as a shining example of government competency...which just wouldn't do when power transferred to Republicans who believe that all government is incompetent by definition. So Michael Brown was appointed to align FEMA with Republican rhetoric, to undermine its competency and privatize its functions, and basically undo the gains it had achieved under Clinton. When Bush said "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!" amid the devastation of Katrina, he was neither clueless nor kidding: That was the result he'd expected of Michale Brown.
All in all a reasoned and reasonable essay.