There's a familiar meme flowing from Bushco in the wake of their disasterous mishandling of Katrina: there'll be time enough, in the future to assess success, failure and most importantly, blame. It's the same line they employed after the invasion but before the election, with W justifying the delay to Russert on the grounds that he wanted a thorough investigation, unrushed by politics. More than that, though, it's one of the cardinal foundations upon which Bushco is predicated: Reality, as Robert Anton Wilson succicntly put it, is whatever you can get away with.
more on the flip...
They create realities while, as Ron Suskind's informant summarized, we judiciously study what they've created - like the proverbial tortoise racing with the hare. His assertion that that was the way things would shake out arrogantly assumed that any genuine judgement day could be indefinitely postponed. He was conceiving a future that could be controlled. A sort of permanent relationship of tortoise and hare, or better, hare and lynx.
It's interesting to put it in those latter terms, because they suggest a well-known type of mathematical attractor (a so-called limit attractor) predicting the interrelated cycles of predator and prey populations.
Remember what Socrates determines in the long preamble to the Republic: the ruling class can only serve its own interests in so far as it understands them. And in so far as it looks from the self-interested perspective by which it has been enriched, it fails to see the crash immanent in dynamical law. I read Socrates as implying that in order to truly understand its own interests the ruling class must be cognizant of its dependence on the lower classes upon which it feeds. This understanding, when applied, is termed "Justice." We might see the same idea in the Ma'at of hierarchical Ancient Egypt.
But what - and here's what I suspect, tinfoil and all - if the ruling class in the case of Bushco and it's global allies, having the benefit of thousands of years of historical example, has taken the coming crash into account? What if they expect the crash, denying its imminence not because they disbelieve it, but because it is the conerstone upon which their strategy is founded? Theirs is a strategy - and putting it in these exact terms connects the movement across a sacred/secular divide - that aims not at avoiding Judgement Day (in which case it'd be called "sustainable") but at designing it. The key to this is controlling Justice.
Thus their whole idea of "crisis management," as revealed of late, is hanging on to power as civilization crumbles around them. The End of Civilization is a given of their contingency planning: not a "what if," but a "when." While all the savvy politicos are thinking about '06 and '08, the wizards of Bushco are planning for The World After April - Ursula K. Leguin's phrase for the post-apocalypse.
Peak Oil, Global Warming, the end of the Welfare State: however exactly we conceive of the Period of Tribulation, I believe we live in a world whose leaders are preparing in private for what they publicly ignore, deny and oppose.
Of course, that makes me crazy.