Were Lawrence Wilkerson some sort of quiche-eating, Prius-driving, gay-marrying, freedom-hating liberal, conservatives could just dismiss what he said while addressing members of the New America Foundation as more Bush-bashing by the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream liberal media.

But Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (retired), is a Vietnam veteran who served Gen. Colin Powell as his chief of staff when Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He later served as head of the Marine War College and Secretary of State Powell's top aide. In short, before stepping down this year, he was an official within the Bush administration, and the experience has left him angry.

"What I saw for four-plus years (as a Bush administration official) was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," Wilkerson told the New America Foundation, a politically moderate Washington think tank, on Oct. 19. "Now (the administration) is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is that America is paying the consequences."

Wilkerson compared the administration's penchant for making decisions in secret, and its ineptitude in carrying decisions out, to the situation in 1776 when Americans threw off a tyrannical and inept government.

"If something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you're going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence," Wilkerson said, adding, "I think you're talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times."

Wilkerson is the latest conservative to express reservations about the effects of President Bush's governing process. Both publicly and privately, conservative leaders have criticized Bush's appointment of his loyal but undistinguished personal lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court; cronyism and incompetence within the Federal Emergency Management Agency; free-spending collusion between private and public interests and the lack of accountability for failures in Iraq.

Most recently, George Will, the conservative eminence grise, wrote in Newsweek "Conservatives are not supposed to be cuddly, or even particularly nice. They are, however, supposed to be competent. And to know that scarcity — of money, virtue, wisdom, competence, everything — forces choices. Furthermore, they are supposed to have an unsentimental commitment to meritocracy and excellence. The fact that none of those responsible for the post-war planning, or lack thereof, in Iraq have been sacked suggests — no, shouts — that in Washington today there is no serious penalty for serious failure. Hence the multiplication of failures."

It would be a relief to report that Democrats offered a competent alternative, or at least a vision of one. If such exists, it is not yet evident. America thus must await that which it should be able to take for granted: competent, capable leadership of whatever political party.