I haven’t posted yet about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but I’ve been following the story (like pretty much everyone in the US fortunate enough not to be more-directly involved). Probably inevitably, I’ve been drawn to stories that attempt to draw a connection between Bush’s leadership (or lack thereof) and the extent of the chaos.

I have mixed feelings about these stories. There’s a side of me that wants very much to make sure that Bush’s shortcomings as president are exposed. But there’s another side of me that says hey, wait a second. People are dying. Tens of thousands of people, probably, have died or are going to die in the coming days as a result of this disaster. We have more-immediate concerns right now than Bush’s shortcomings.

Besides that, no one, not even a Bush-hater like me, can blame the guy for this. Hurricanes happen, and they pre-date the Bush administration. New Orleans was built on sinking ground in one of the wettest parts of the world — again, before Bush came along. Give the political knife-sharpening a rest. There will be time for assigning whatever blame rightfully belongs to Bush later.

That second side of me has a good point, which is one reason why I haven’t posted about this until now. But despite that, I want to mention some stories I’ve been reading about this, and talk a little about how I view the various criticisms.

There are four main prongs of the blame-Bush-for-Katrina’s-misery argument:

Prong the first: Bush’s contributions to climate change. By fighting a delaying action against any effective response to global warming, Bush has contributed to a situation that scientific consensus now agrees is creating more-severe hurricanes. Logically, this argument is weak. It might be correct; but there’s no proof at this point. Super-strong hurricanes like this may be becoming more common as a result of the policies Bush has been supporting, but it’s too early to say that with any degree of certainty. Yeah, I think Bush’s head-in-the-sand approach to global warming is stupid, and evil, but as a practical matter of today’s politics, he’s safe from being challenged on this issue (which, indeed, is probably why he feels safe serving the interests of his big-energy buddies, even if it means dooming millions of our descendents to climate-related misery — those descendents don’t have a vote today).

Anyway, making this argument against Bush just makes it easy for Bush supporters to mock us for being reflexive haters. I’m giving this argument a pass for now.

Prong the second: Poor disaster prep. Bush’s fingerprints are all over the weakening of FEMA and the reassignment of its responsibilities to the now-revealed-to-be-woefully-inadequate Dept. of Homeland Security. He has slashed the budget for levee upgrades, and supported wetland draining and development. All of these actions have served to make this disaster much worse than it otherwise would have been.

People have been screaming about this for years, and now they’ve been proven right. I think this is the strongest argument against Bush, logically. No, he wasn’t responsible for causing the hurricane or choosing a stupid spot to build a city. But his policies have made the aftermath of the storm worse than it needed to be.

Still, I think Bush has a good chance of having most of this mud slide off him. As with the inadequate attention given to al Qaeda prior to 9/11, and the pre-war intelligence doctoring on Iraq, the mere fact that we have smoking-gun documentation of his mistakes doesn’t mean he’ll be held accountable for them. He’s really, really good at escaping blame in these situations. Freakishly good, you could say.

Prong the third: Misplaced priorities. Through the launching of an ill-advised war of choice that has siphoned off manpower and dollars, Bush has severely constrained our disaster-recovery options. Yeah, the Iraq war was stupid, and we’re now paying a price for having a quarter or more of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard troops in Iraq. And the fact that the federal coffers have been drained by $5 billion/month for the last two and a half years to pay for the war certainly hasn’t helped.

Whether this argument carries weight with a particular person basically turns on whether that person supports the war or not. Given that a majority of the US now believes the war was a mistake, I think this is potentially a pretty damaging argument against Bush. Symbolically, at least, the fact that we now have a domestic example of inadequate preparation and bungled aftermath, with dramatic TV visuals for months to come, is going to make a lot of people connect those dots in their heads. I call first dibs on the use of “quagmire” (metaphorical in the case of Iraq, literal in the case of Katrina’s aftermath) as a linking device in the resulting story.

Prong the fourth: Poor leadership. Through his weak and ineffectual initial response, Bush has contributed to the chaos we’ve seen in the early stages of the hurricane-recovery effort.

This argument doesn’t carry as much weight with me as some of the other ones. Yeah, he could have done a better job of cheerleading and comforting the country and marshalling our efforts on behalf of the victims. But I’m not sure that his failure to do so has made much of a real-world difference.

The fact that Bush doesn’t do real-time leadership very well isn’t something I really hold against him personally. He’s just not that kind of guy. He’s not that smart (book-smart, I mean). He doesn’t really know much, and when he’s caught flat-footed by events it shows. He needs a few days for Karl and the gang to figure out what response will put him in the best light, and then they have to write the speech, and set up the visuals, and all that takes time.

But this is the prong that I think could damage him the most in the public eye, because of the memories it evokes of his initial response to 9/11. Will he be able to pull off another bullhorn-speech-at-Ground-Zero moment to supplant the public’s image of him as an incompetent boob? I don’t know. I’m sure he’ll try.

And note this, too: It’s not so much that Bush was slow to react after the hurricane. It was that he was slow to react before it hit, when it was clear that it was headed for New Orleans, and when a little presidential goosing of the relevant agencies might well have made a difference that could have saved thousands of lives.

Okay; enough of me. Here are the links I promised:

• Explosions rock flooded New Orleans — from South Africa’s Mail & Guardian Online.
• McClellan Refuses To Answer Questions About Levee Funding — from ThinkProgress.
• Waiting for a leader — NY Times editorial.
• Bush and Katrina, Chronology, and Clueless — Kevin Drum.
• Former Clinton advisor: No one can say they didn’t see it coming — Sidney Blumenthal in Spiegel Online.
• Destroying FEMA — Eric Holdeman in the Washington Post.
• Democracy sucks — Philosoraptor.
• A total disaster — good link roundup from Michael of Discourse.net.
• Here are some things to consider… — Joshua Micah Marshall.

And finally, I want to steal these two images from David Corn. Both were taken on Tuesday, August 30:

Pretty much tells the story, doesn’t it?

Paul Krugman connects the dots between Iraq and New Orleans: A Can’t-Do Government.

I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

Some of the wilder TV moments I’ve seen in the past few days:

• Geraldo Rivera making a young baby cry by taking it from its mother and holding it up to the camera, then bawling himself as he hectored Sean Hannity on Fox. (Crooks and Liars has video.)
• Bush, touring the devastated region on Friday, picking the worst possible time to do his smirk-and-chuckle act. Definitely missed a chance to deliver the bullhorn-from-Ground-Zero moment there. (Commentary by Kevin Drum and Jeffrey Dubner.)
• Various other TV journalists (like Anderson Cooper) snapping at their handlers back in the studio, or at politicians trying to put a happy face on the disaster-relief efforts. See CNN’s very interesting roundup of the discrepencies between official and on-the-ground versions of the disaster: The big disconnect on New Orleans.

The usual suspects are attacking Bush, and the usual suspects are defending him, and I’m not terribly impressed with the more knee-jerk reactions on either side. Digging into the meat of the story, though, there do seem to be some pretty clear connections between the inadequacy of the federal response and Bush’s history with FEMA.

First, let’s dismiss this early talking point of Bush’s (since abandoned, as far as I’m aware), when he said that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Take a look at this Scientific American article, for example, from October of 2001: Drowning New Orleans.

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.

There’s a lot more material like that being talked about, including newspaper articles dating to the debate that took place over the last few years regarding whether or not to fund studies of levee improvements.

But setting aside the question of whether, with the benefit of hindsight, more money and effort should have been put into preventing this disaster, the real political peril for Bush lies in the bungled aftermath.

As early as Wednesday, August 31, the actual journalists at Knight-Ridder (the same outfit that was right early on about the flimsy Iraqi WMD intel) were reporting in detail about the extent of the bungling in the federal response: Federal government wasn’t ready for Katrina, disaster experts say.

AP writer Sharon Theimer had a story today (Congress likely to probe Guard response) that contained the following jaw-dropping graph, just one of several fairly shocking factoids the article describes:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state’s National Guard last Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come from Washington until late Thursday.

Kevn Drum offered some interesting perspective on all this yesterday: Ideology and real life.

One of the things that Hurricane Katrina has done is shine a very bright light on the different worldviews of liberals and conservatives.

Conservatives fundamentally believe in a limited role for the federal government. They believe in downsizing, privatizing, and placing greater reliance on state and local government to provide essential services. It’s easy — too easy — to blame George Bush in hindsight for specific things like cutting the Corps of Engineers budget for the New Orleans district, but the reason this criticism is legitimate is because this wasn’t merely a specific incident. As even some conservatives tacitly admit, it was a direct result of George Bush’s governing ideology.

FEMA was downsized and partially privatized because modern Republican leaders think that’s the right thing to do with federal agencies. Budgets were limited for levee construction and first responder training because Republicans have other priorities. The federal government was slow to respond to Katrina because conservatives believe states should take the lead in looking out for their own needs. George Bush talks endlessly to the cameras about the private sector helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast because that’s the kind thing conservatives believe in.

Liberals, by contrast, believe in a robust role for the federal government. We believe in sharing risk nationwide for local disasters. We believe that only the federal government is big enough to coordinate relief on the scale needed by an event like Katrina, and that strong, well managed agencies like FEMA should take the lead role in making this happen.

Looking in more detail at the history of Bush’s oversight of FEMA, the facts really look quite bad for anyone trying to carve out a safe haven from accountability for him. Some Wikipedia articles I recommend to you for further information:

• Political effects of Hurricane Katrina
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• Joe Allbaugh — Bush’s former chief of staff in Texas, and his first appointee to head FEMA. “As director of FEMA, Allbaugh brought about several internal reorganizations of FEMA designed to shrink the agency in size and scope. In particular, the Allbaugh FEMA diminished the Clinton administration’s organizational emphasis on disaster mitigation.”
• Michael D. Brown — FEMA’s current head.

Brown is an interesting case. He had no prior disaster-recovery experience before being tapped to work under Allbaugh, his former college roommate, and then ascended to the head of the agency when Allbaugh left to work as a lobbyist for Iraq reconstruction firms. According to an article by Brett Arends in today’s Boston Herald (Brown pushed from last job: Horse group: FEMA chief had to be ‘asked to resign’), Brown has a less-than-stellar background:

Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders’ and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

“We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,” explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner’s office. “This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,” she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

“He was asked to resign,” Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

Are you pissed off yet? I think I’m getting pretty close. Some bloggers whose own emotional reactions have gone several steps farther than mine are Cherie Priest (Disjointed thoughts on the socio-economics of disaster) and Steve Gilliard (We told you so).

Maureen Dowd doesn’t leave much wiggle-room for Bush: United States of Shame.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

BAGnewsNotes does the usual awesome job of squeezing every last drop of meaning out of an iconic news photograph: in this case, the one of Bush strumming while New Orleans drowned last Tuesday: The Week America Lost New Orleans: A Presidential Retrospective (#2).

From Washington Post staff writers Manuel Roig-Franzia and Spencer Hsu: Many evacuated, but thousands still waiting. Here’s the cool image from the WaPo web site (since modified to be less of a Kanye West moment), preserved for posterity by Kevin Drum:

Apparently the same news organizations that have a hard time seeing through official talking points when the realities they obscure are far away can do a significantly better job when the B.S. is contradicted by umpteen on-the-ground reporters closer to home. At least, CNN isn’t falling for Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff’s statements at a news conference yesterday that the “‘perfect storm’ of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight”: Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist.

He called the disaster “breathtaking in its surprise.”

But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail.

Kevin Drum is upset at reports indicating that some of Bush’s media appearances Friday, which seemed to show significant progress in the government’s response to the disaster, were in fact stage props that were abandoned or dismantled as soon as the Bush-trailing press pack had moved on: Behind the curtain.

Drum quotes Mark Kleiman, who in turn quotes a press release from Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu that says:

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.

Drum goes on to quote from a Dutch corresondent of blogger Laura of War and Piece, who wrote the following:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Maybe I was a little too quick to give CNN credit for reporting the reality behind the official spin.

Following up on the Kevin Drum piece I linked to the other day that talked about the bungled response to Katrina representing the difference between conservative and liberal ideology, here’s a (probably inevitable) visual juxtaposition that’s making the rounds. I haven’t been able to find out who created the original version; the farthest back I’ve been able to trace it is this posting at MaxSpeak: Drown Grover Norquist in a bathtub. If you know who created it and can let me know, I’ll give proper credit. Anyway:

Here’s some excellent analysis from Mark Kleiman on the difference between reality and spin, and how the media report on the discrepancy (when they do): GWB as Baghdad Bob.

Hannah Arendt once said that a modern liar doesn’t expect to get his story believed, but only to have it accepted as a legitimate opinion in competition with other opinions rather than as a falsehood in conflict with the truth. The news media version of “objectivity,” which treats statements and counter-statements as neutral facts but forbids the reporter to “editorialize” by comparing either with objective reality, clearly helps that strategy along.

But it turns out that there are limits.

Kleiman goes on to offer some fine examples from recent days: Ron Fornier of the AP, Jack Shafer of Slate, and the New York Daily News, which characterized Bush’s touring of the disaster zone on Friday as “a gesture meant to curb growing criticism,” and spoke of his having “posed for pictures with teary-eyed victims.”

From Susan B. Glasser and Josh White in the Washington Post: Storm exposed disarray at the top.

“It’s such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11,” said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. “We are so much less than what we were in 2000,” added another senior FEMA official. “We’ve lost a lot of what we were able to do then.”

Competence matters. Accountability matters. Being good at spin is not the same thing as being good at reality, and when the former is emphasized at the expense of the latter, you sow the seeds of disaster.

Must-see TV for today: Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La), in tears as she describes to George Stephanopolous the way the big levee-repair operation she visited with Bush on Friday has now scaled back to a single crane. Oh, and threatening to “punch, literally” anyone (including the president) who criticizes the efforts of New Orleans law enforcement.

Norm of Onegoodmove has the video: One more word.

I didn’t catch today’s Meet the Press in real-time, but whoa, this appearance by Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard was hard-core. From Crooks and Liars: Broussard: “We have been abandoned by our own country”.

More comment on the ongoing Bush effort to shift the blame, as described in the Washington Post article I linked to earlier. Kevin Drum: Factually challenged. And Joshua Marshall: It’s almost awe-inspiring….

Earlier I linked to some items about how the Washington Post had run a story today that reported (incorrectly) that as of yesterday Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco had failed to declare a state of emergency, thus slowing the federal response to the disaster. The Post sourced that assertion to a “senior Bush official” (and has since issued a correction).

Joshua Marshall wonders now if it’s just coincidence that a September 1 story in Newsweek appears to be peddling the same spin: Did Newsweek get spun too?

It’s kind of a minor issue, all things considered. But if it does turn out that the same person(s) who peddled the false story to the Post also got it into Newsweek, it would certainly be consistent with what we’ve learned in recent months (via the Plame affair) about how the Bush team operates when it’s in a tight spot, public-relations wise.

I was going to link to a good article in the LA Times today, but Kevin Drum already did, including preserving relevant chunks from reclamation by the Times’ content-rotation policies, so I can link to him instead. The article covers the recent history of FEMA, including juicy quotes from Clinton-era FEMA people decrying Bush-era changes: “Awe inspiring”
.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the behind-the-scenes pushback from the Bush camp. Not surprisingly, it appears that Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett are pulling the hidden levers: White House enacts a plan to ease political damage.

Here’s a good opinion piece from LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik that sums up the main problems with the Bush administration’s response to Katrina: Bush’s hurricane response a disaster.

Hiltzik’s conclusion:

President Bush will surely feel the consequences of his dereliction. Every policy of his administration will be viewed through the prism of the debacle of New Orleans. The pursuit of a personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein, supported by manipulated intelligence, has sucked billions out of the treasury and removed more than 30% of Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard members from their homes, so they must watch the disaster unfold from half a world away instead of assisting their own communities. Tax cuts for the wealthy have been financed by budget cuts for disaster preparedness and other crucial programs. Four years of anti-terrorism planning have failed to produce a competent system for mitigating a metropolitan cataclysm — one that, on the ground, is indistinguishable from the effects of the terrorist attack we’ve supposedly been girding for since 9/11.

Then there’s Bush’s sustained assault on social insurance programs such as Social Security, safety nets that are to be replaced by the slogan “You’re on your own.”

New Orleans is not a local calamity; it belongs to us all, not least because it signals what to expect from this administration. If a major earthquake strikes Los Angeles or San Francisco, will President Bush wait to respond until he can conclude his vacation, as he did last week? Will his appointees express surprise at an eventuality that “no one could have predicted”?

Probably. George W. Bush is known for never admitting his mistakes. Consequently, he never learns from his mistakes. The chances are dismal that he will learn from this one. We’re on our own.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I find myself wondering if Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s story about the dying mother was truthful. That is, I know that many thousands of people (probably many tens of thousands, though official estimates have not climbed that high as of this point) have died in the disaster, and if his story isn’t specifically true, it’s certainly well-demonstrated that the relief operation has seen widespread bungling and delays, and that many, many people’s mothers must have died as a result.

But as I watch Broussard’s performance on Meet the Press, I find myself wondering if what I’m seeing is a performance, in the sense of being good old-fashioned snake-oil politics. I mean, was his tearful story scrupulously accurate? Or was it maybe based on a true story, but embellished for effect? Or was it an out-and-out fiction? I confess that when I first viewed it I was moved to tears; his sudden anguish, the raised pitch of his voice, the repeated promises to the stricken mother (”Yeah, Momma, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday…”) It’s very powerful stuff. Even with my current doubts, I still get misty-eyed watching it.

But I can’t help wondering. Watching the whole interview, if one assumes that Broussard was telling a carefully crafted story designed to elicit emotion and control the course of the interview, it was a masterful job. He basically took over Russert’s program and made the segment into a powerful symbol of FEMA ineptitude. The pacing of what he talked about seemed well-designed to build to that heart-wrenching climax. And the story itself is somewhat lacking in detail; no specific name of the “guy who runs this building I’m in, Emergency Management, he’s responsible for everything.” There is a mention of the “St. Bernard nursing home” (is that a town? or a specific institution?), but again, it seems like it might be tough to actually verify what he said as truthful, based on the information given.

In the larger sense, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not trying to say that the story, if fictional, in any way lessens the very real human suffering that has taken place. And again, I have absolutely no evidence that the story is fake. But I confess to being curious about the extent to which my emotions in watching that segment were being consciously manipulated for political effect, and if they were, the extent to which the underlying story was accurate or invented. And if it turned out that Broussard actually was lying when he told that story, it would tend to undercut the credibility of the remarks he made earlier in the interview about the problems he witnessed with the FEMA response.

Anyway, if anyone has any information on Broussard’s background and track-record in terms of honesty, or on the specifics of this particular story, I’d be interested in seeing it. Thanks.

NASA’s MESSENGER mission is a space probe launched in August, 2004. Its planned itinerary includes no fewer than six planetary flybys (one of Earth, two of Venus, and three of Mercury) before it enters orbit around Mercury in March, 2011.

In the past I’ve sometimes griped about Earth flybys of space probes powered by plutonium RTGs; not so much to argue that the risks of a high-altitude vaporization and subsequent release of plutonium aren’t worth it, but to call for a more-honest discussion of the risks than has sometimes been offerred by mission supporters.

But MESSENGER doesn’t represent a problem in that area; its destination in the inner solar system means that it will have plenty of Sun power from its solar panels, and so it apparently is plutonium-free.

And the Earth flyby already happened, anyway, on August 2, 2005. I talked in PhotosFromTheSpaceShuttleColumbia about the importance of having human eyes in space to deliver perspective-changing images, but even if a robot can’t be as good at catching opportunistic snapshots as a human being, it can still deliver some amazing views.

Like the one on display here: Earth departure movie. The official site’s description:

The Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft captured several stunning images of Earth during a gravity assist swingby of its home planet on Aug. 2, 2005. Several hundred images, taken with the wide-angle camera in MESSENGER’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), were sequenced into a movie documenting the view from MESSENGER as it departed Earth.

Comprising 358 frames taken over 24 hours, the movie follows Earth through one complete rotation. The spacecraft was 40,761 miles (65,598 kilometers) above South America when the camera started rolling on Aug. 2. It was 270,847 miles (435,885 kilometers) away from Earth – farther than the Moon’s orbit – when it snapped the last image on Aug. 3.

Not really news, since Jack and Meg White’s (of the White Stripes’) marriage certificate was posted on the Internet years ago, and they had never publicly responded to the allegation that they weren’t actually brother and sister, as their publicity bios claimed. But now it’s official: In a recent interview Jack admits that the pair (now divorced) started off as a husband-and-wife team: Jack White admits relationship lie.

White told Rolling Stone magazine that the pair came up with the lie to deflect interest away from their personal lives and to make people concentrate on the music.

He said: “It’s funny that people think me and Meg sit up late at night, in front of a gas lamp, and come up with these intricate lies to trick people.

“If we had presented ourselves in another fashion… how would we have been perceived, right off the bat? When you see a band that is two pieces, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, you think, ‘Oh, I see…”

“When they’re brother and sister, you go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ You care more about the music, not the relationship.”

Um, okay.

I forgot to link to this item back when it was current, but I wanted to mention it in passing. From the Boston Globe on August 31, 2005: Bush gives new reason for Iraq war.

President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country’s vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.

It’s actually fairly impressive that even now, some three years since he first got serious about selling the US public on an invasion of Iraq, Bush is still able to generate a headline like that.

As earlier reasons have been shot down by inconvenient realities, he’s left with little choice but to offer reasons that come closer to being actually true. So Bush ends up lining up with some of his harshest critics (like Viggo Mortensen) in acknowledging that yeah, this war really sort of is about oil.

Bush’s actual quote from the speech:

If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks. They’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition.

Of course, Bush is playing a dangerous game in resorting to vaguely honest rationales. If the point of our being in Iraq was to keep its oil out of the hands of dangerous extremists like Zarqawi and bin Laden, we could have just left Saddam in charge; he was doing a perfectly good job of maintaining a secular bulwark against radical Islam. That, after all, is why Ronald Reagan supported Saddam in the first place, assisting him during Iraq’s war with Iran.

Bush supporters like to harp on the talking point that “Zarqawi was in Iraq before we invaded.” Well, yes. He was operating in the Northern No-Fly Zone, where we had created a lawless region outside the government’s control. Now that we’ve turned the entire country into a lawless region outside the government’s control, Zarqawi’s freedom to operate has, if anything, been enhanced.

None of this is meant to excuse Saddam. He was a brutal dictator. But just because he was a very bad man does not mean that replacing him with (in effect) no workable government at all is necessarily a positive development in terms of US interests. The recognition of this fundamental problem is, after all, what led Bush’s predecessors to leave Saddam in power. For Bush to cite the argument now as a reason why we must sustain the daily toll in blood and dollars that his inept policy is currently consuming isn’t so much an argument that supports his decision-making, as condemns it.

One final noteworthy thing about this quote of Bush’s: He actually mentioned bin Laden by name. When was the last time you heard that?

Say one thing about the Department of Homeland Security: They’ve brought the art of making slickly cheesy government web sites to a high art. Still, I think the bungled Katrina aftermath probably has done infinitely more to foster public awareness of the need to be pepared than this: National Preparedness Month.

Reader (and too-rare co-author) Craig continues to be one of the participants here to whom I’m most grateful. He embodies the vanishingly rare combination of a worldview that runs counter to my own, and a willingness to pay attention to my shrill spoutings in order to let me know when he thinks I’ve got something wrong.

Recently he commented:

John, you have mentioned within the text of your postings that you understand that “others” are also to blame, but yet nearly all your postings seem to focus on Bush and his Administration’s real and assumed failures in this tragedy.

The man has a point. I have been focusing on Bush’s errors in connection with this. And other people are guilty of mistakes and misstatements, too.

I caught the video on the Daily Show (yay! the Daily Show is back) where Bush offered his latest talking points. (Norm of Onegoodmove has Daily Show video: George did it; SFGate has a news write-up of the Bush photo op: Bush says he’ll find out what went wrong.) From the latter:

“One of the things people want us to do here is play the blame game,” [Bush] said. “We got to solve problems. There will be ample time to figure out what went right and what went wrong.”

Of course, if anyone is playing a game here, in the sense of consciously pushing a perception-management agenda, it’s the Bush team. They are the Michael Jordans, the Lance Armstrongs, of that game. That very statement of Bush’s is part of a “blame game,” part of the Karl Rove/Dan Bartlett-crafted storyline designed to deflect responsibility for the debacle onto others.

The mainstream media, making good use of its recently rediscovered backbone, has been pushing back pretty hard. Here’s some of the more noteworthy stuff I’ve been reading on the subject lately, from both the MSM and others:

• The New York Times editorial writers: It’s not a ‘blame game’
• David Remmick in the New Yorker: Under water.
• Bob Herbert: A failure of leadership.
• Frank Rich: Falluja floods the Superdome.
• Arianna Huffington: Memo to the Media: Stop enabling the White House blame game.
• Time magazine: How did this happen?
• Kevin Drum: Bush and Katrina.

Things “went wrong” at all levels in this disaster, and the things that went wrong at the federal level were in many ways the most glaring and inexcusable. As I’ve said before, Bush is not responsible for the fact that there are hurricanes, or for the path that this one took. The indirect contribution to hurricane intensity that some have argued is (or will be) the result of Bush’s policies regarding global warming, is certainly not proven, or even, as far as I can tell, persuasively suggested at this point.

But he is responsible, more than any other single individual, for the federal government’s execution of its mission. That’s why he’s called the “chief executive.” And in this case, the execution of the federal government’s mission sucked.

Bush’s single biggest failure here, I think, was the cronyism that led to there being such a competence vacuum at the top of the federal disaster-relief operation. For the last five years Bush has been consistently staffing the upper reaches of the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, with incompetents whose main qualification is that they are good Republicans and/or friends of friends. Calls to immediately fire FEMA chief Mike Brown are very much in order. (See, for example, this story by Ted Bridis: FEMA chief sent help only after storm hit.) And, uncharacteristically for an under-fire Bush minion, there are signs that he might actually be let go (see War and Piece: In an administration in which PR is policy…). But if Brown is fired, it’s important that he be replaced by someone who actually knows what he’s doing, rather than by one of his own current underlings. (See ThinkProgress: Top FEMA deputies make Brown look qualified.)

But to return to the subject I started off talking about, it’s not all about Bush. And as hard as it is for me to do, I’m now going to (temporarily) stop talking about how much he is to blame for all this, and give some attention to other people who have been incompetent and/or dishonest.

Charles Bird at Obsidian Wings makes a compelling case that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin badly bungled the timing and execution of the original evacuation order: At all levels. As Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff said in his Meet the Press appearance last week, the best, and in some ways the only effective way to save the citizens of New Orleans was to get them out of town before the levees broke. And city officials knew they would have a couple of hundred thousand citizens who wouldn’t or couldn’t leave on their own.

It’s not as simple as Bush-supporting webloggers would have us believe; the mere fact that there are satellite photos showing hundreds of city buses drowned in neat rows in their parking lots doesn’t mean it would have been easy, or even feasible, to use those buses to get New Orleans’ poor out of the city ahead of Katrina. But the city government could have, and should have, made the effort. They should have had a better evacuation plan ready to go. Even if they ended up being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster, they should have gone down swinging. It would have made a difference.

Finally, let me offer a couple of corrections of anti-Bush talking points I’ve previously given space to here, and which have turned out not to be what they appeared to be.

First up, the good people at Respectful of Otters and Idealistic Pragmatist have done an impressive job of debunking the story, attributed to German news reports, that Bush’s visit to the disaster area on the Friday after the storm featured stage-prop disaster-relief facilities that were torn down after he left. Nope; that was a random TV viewer’s invention, or perhaps misinterpretation, based on the German broadcast, which featured a local official talking about how the advance team that arrived to clean up the location of a Bush photo op was the first federal assistance they’d received. Details: Lost in translation.

And finally, on the question I raised a few days ago about Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s tearful story about his emergency manager’s mother drowning in a St. Bernard nursing home, I think the evidence shows pretty clearly that Broussard was embellishing the story. Readers helpfully pointed me to the following news accounts:

• New York Times: In nursing home, a fight lost to rising waters.
• Newsday: Desperately seeking survivors.
• MSNBC: This anger comes from watching death.

From the MSNBC item:

The man he was talking about is Thomas Rodrigue, who told “Dateline” that his 92-year-old mother was one of 32 elderly people found dead at the St. Rita’s nursing home.

But the 32 people who died at St. Rita’s nursing home didn’t die on Friday; they died earlier in the week, when the floodwaters first inundated the low-lying facility. Rather than being attributable to the federal authorities’ slow response (which was pretty much the point of Broussard’s version of the story), the death of those senior citizens was more the fault of local authorities (who failed to evacuate them) than of federal officials (who wouldn’t have been there in time to rescue them under the best of circumstances).

So, assuming the MSNBC story is accurate, Broussard’s story was at least significantly embellished. The tear-jerking account of the repeated calls to momma were fictional (or at least were displaced from their actual time of occurrence, which would have to have been before or during the storm, not during the several days afterward when FEMA was MIA). And if that part was fiction, it would mean that Broussard, for all the apparent sincerity in his emotional on-air breakdown, was willing to lie in order to make his story work better as political theater, which in turn makes it harder for me to credit the rest of the slow-FEMA-response anecdotes he described.

It would mean that Broussard was playing the blame game, too, using invented details to make a real story of tragedy work better at putting federal authorities on the spot for their slow response. And in the context of a local politician from a devastated area trying to do whatever he could to get those federal resources moving, I have a hard time faulting him for that.

Aaron Broussard didn’t invent the blame game. And he certainly isn’t the only one playing it these days. But if my interpretation of this story is correct, he’s a much better player than I originally gave him credit for.

Valued lies.com reader trg34211 supplied a link to the following transcript from CNN’s Newsnight program. It features an interview with Tom Rodrigue, whose mother’s death by drowning after days of frantic phonecalls was tearfully described by Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press last week: Newsnight with Aaron Brown.

It seems increasingly likely that Rodrigue’s mother died in the initial flooding on Monday, August 29, and that Broussard’s story about frantic phonecalls on the subsequent Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday was a lie.

I think it’s interesting that CNN didn’t point that out in this segment of their program. My guess would be that an editorial judgment was reached that nitpicking over the specifics of Broussard’s story would seem heartless and cruel in light of the tragedy Rodrigue endured. And I guess they’d have a point.

Lies.com: Heartless, cruel nitpicking since 1996.

Anyway, here’s the transcript:

COOPER: …And, you know, every day, new numbers frame the story here in New Orleans. One of the grimmest numbers from yesterday was this: More than 30 bodies found inside a nursing home in St. Bernard Parish. Why weren’t these people evacuated before the storm struck? That is a question that is both glaring and tonight remains unanswered.

Here’s CNN’s Susan Candiotti.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tom Rodrigue is living a nightmare. He knew his 92-year-old mother, Eva, was in deep trouble. And he was helpless to get her out of harm’s way.

TOM RODRIGUE, VICTIM’S SON: We’ve had numerous storms before, and they know that, if they evacuate, she needs to go with them.

CANDIOTTI: His mother, Eva Rodrigue lived, and apparently died, with more than 30 others in St. Rita’s Nursing Home, which was flooded after Katrina swept into New Orleans. Some were evacuated, but many were not moved to safety in time and drowned.

RODRIGUE: She didn’t have Alzheimer’s. She knew who people was. She remembered things. And she could still get around on a walker. So she wasn’t an invalid, you know? So she could move around.

CANDIOTTI: Tom Rodrigue, himself a former emergency management director for Louisiana’s National Guard, was out of town when Katrina turned toward New Orleans. He started calling the nursing home Saturday, urging that it be evacuated.

RODRIGUE: You know, they indicated they were not going to leave.

CANDIOTTI: Sunday night, as Katrina struck, Rodrigue was 30 miles away directing emergency personnel for Jefferson Parish. He called the nursing home in St. Bernard Parish again, pleading with officials to get the residents out. He was told they were going to try.

RODRIGUE: I called the St. Bernard officials again and, you know, told them that, you know, they’ve got to get, you know, these people out. And they said they notified them, and that they weren’t — they refused to leave. And I said, “Well, you need to send the sheriff’s office down there and make them leave.” And he said, “I’m doing everything I can.”

CANDIOTTI: On Wednesday, 10 days after Katrina struck, authorities began removing bodies from St. Rita’s Nursing Home. Eva Rodrigue’s remains have not yet been found.

CNN has been so far unable to reach the nursing home owners to find out whether they had an evacuation plan and if the workers did all they could to clear the place out. CNN reviewed St. Rita’s records on the state’s web site. It indicates the home’s license expired last July, but we couldn’t reach state authorities to confirm that. For Tom Rodrigue, the pain is overwhelming.

RODRIGUE: She may not have been able to withstand the ordeal, even if they would have rescued her. But she deserved the chance, you know, to be rescued, instead of having to drown like a rat.

CANDIOTTI: Susan Candiotti, CNN, New Orleans.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

From Harper’s magazine, an interesting, if depressing, account of what happened in the pivotal state of Ohio during the 2004 presidential election: None dare call it stolen.

Here’s an excellent write-up of what it’s like to be in New Orleans these days. From New York Times reporter Dan Barry: Macabre reminder: The corpse on Union Street.

It’s some measure of how truly awful a president George Bush is that I’m giving serious thought these days to announcing pre-emptive support for virtually anyone, even a Republican, as a replacement for him, as long as the replacement manifests a degree of intelligence and competence. Rudy Giuliani? Probably. John McCain? Eww, that’s a hard one. Ask me later.

Colin Powell?

The answer used to be, “Sure. In a heartbeat.” Then came his long, slow transformation at the hands of the Bush public relations machine. When he joined the Bush White House, Powell had built up a store of credibility and respect during long years of honest public service. Then the Bush team spent the next four years using him like a sponge, squeezing out a little of his credibility in support of one lie over here, another over there, until, when there was nothing left to squeeze, they cast him aside.

Anyway, I found the following interesting: Powell calls his U.N. speech a lasting blot on his record.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - The former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, says in a television interview to be broadcast Friday that his 2003 speech to the United Nations, in which he gave a detailed description of Iraqi weapons programs that turned out not to exist, was “painful” for him personally and would be a permanent “blot” on his record.

“I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world,” Mr. Powell told Barbara Walters of ABC News, adding that the presentation “will always be a part of my record.”

Asked by Ms. Walters how painful this was for him, Mr. Powell replied: “It was painful. It’s painful now.”

Yeah, well, it still pains some of us, too.

Here’s an excellent op-ed piece from Paul Krugman: Point those fingers.

It might make sense to hold off on the criticism if this were the first big disaster on Mr. Bush’s watch, or if the chain of mistakes in handling Hurricane Katrina were out of character. But even with the most generous possible assessment, this is the administration’s second big policy disaster, after Iraq. And the chain of mistakes was perfectly in character - there are striking parallels between the errors the administration made in Iraq and the errors it made last week.

In Iraq, the administration displayed a combination of paralysis and denial after the fall of Baghdad, as uncontrolled looting destroyed much of Iraq’s infrastructure.

The same deer-in-the-headlights immobility prevailed as Katrina approached and struck the Gulf Coast. The storm gave plenty of warning. By the afternoon of Monday, Aug. 29, the flooding of New Orleans was well under way - city officials publicly confirmed a breach in the 17th Street Canal at 2 p.m. Yet on Tuesday federal officials were still playing down the problem, and large-scale federal aid didn’t arrive until last Friday.

In Iraq the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country during the crucial first year after Saddam’s fall - the period when an effective government might have forestalled the nascent insurgency - was staffed on the basis of ideological correctness and personal connections rather than qualifications. At one point Ari Fleischer’s brother was in charge of private-sector development.

The administration followed the same principles in staffing FEMA. The agency had become a highly professional organization during the Clinton years, but under Mr. Bush it reverted to its former status as a “turkey farm,” a source of patronage jobs.

There’s more, and it’s all spot-on.

Sometimes the disconnect between reality and spin is so huge, so ridiculous, that even the Bush team has to bow to the inevitable. So it is that Michael Brown, of whom Bush famously said during his September 2 visit to the disaster area, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” and who is still the (nominal) head of FEMA, has been recalled to Washington so Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard can take over as Katrina-recovery point-man.

From the New York Times’ David Stout: Announcement follows barrage of criticism; new chief is named. I especially liked this part:

Mr. Brown’s standing was further clouded when Time magazine reported on its Web site Thursday that he had embellished some of his credentials. When he was asked today whether he had done so, and whether he would resign from FEMA, Mr. Brown was silent.

Instead, Mr. Chertoff spoke up. “You heard the ground rules,” he said. “I’m going to answer the questions.” Earlier, Mr. Chertoff had advised reporters to choose their questions carefully, because his time was limited.

Yeah, I think we’ve heard pretty much the last (officially sanctioned) commentary from Michael Brown that we’re going to hear for a long time.

The reference to the embellished credentials concerns the piece in Time magazine (How reliable is Brown’s resume?) that pointed out (among other fibs) that Brown had turned what was basically an intern position as assistant to the city manager of Edmond, Oklahoma, into “serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight.”

There’s some additional back-story about Brown’s not-quite-firing in Elisabeth Bumiller’s analysis piece from the New York Times: Casualty of firestorm: Outrage, Bush and FEMA chief.

Update: Also, don’t miss this cool video montage (courtesy Norm of Onegoodmove) of David Gregory playing the “blame game” with Scott McClellan in the days leading up to the firing: That’s a dodge.

Here’s a good example of the kind of BAGnewsNotes piece I was talking about the other day. On first glance, I look at the photos and think, hm, I’m not sure there’s any there there. But then I read the analysis, and look at the images again, and I have to say, huh, yeah, I think you’ve got a point.

Damn you clinical psychologists with your insightful analysis of seemingly innocuous phenomena!

Anyway: Laura: Just say N.O.

One aspect of the Katrina aftermath that was kind of murky to me in the early days, but has cleared up considerably lately, is the odd paradox of the news footage we were seeing of thousands of people packed in and slowly dying from lack of medication, water, and food at the Convention Center. The reporters seemingly were coming and going at will. Why didn’t the people stuck at the Convention Center just walk out?

Well, as it turns out, because they couldn’t. The nearby bridge out of the city was sealed off by local law enforcement officials who, reportedly frightened at the prospect of desperate looters invading their suburban enclaves, used gunfire to turn back advancing groups of would-be self-rescuers.

This makes sense in light of that wild video of Geraldo Rivera and Shepherd Smith from the Convention Center, when they were yelling at Sean Hannity about how officials should just let these people leave (see Crooks and Liars video).

It’s one thing to have a culture so geared toward people affluent enough to own SUVs that you disregard those without vehicles in the initial evacuation. It’s disturbingly worse to carry that cultural bias forward to the point of forcing thousands of refugees to die slowly over a period of several days because you’re not allowing people to walk across a freeway bridge into your community.

Much has been made of the “Third World” quality of the images that emerged from New Orleans. But in some ways this is worse than that. In the Third World, at least, refugees would have been streaming out of the city on foot from the first day. In the USA, though, we sealed them up in a hell on earth and waited for them to die.

That’s really pretty horrible.

Anyway, here’s some discussion of the issue, including links to the firsthand accounts of people involved, from Rogers Cadenhead of Workbench (Police trapped thousands in New Orleans) and Kevin Drum (Savagery and Savagery… a followup).

(For those keeping score, note that these were local law enforcement authorities manning the bridge. I haven’t mentioned Bush, or the lackluster federal response to the disaster, at all in this piece.) (Oops. Until now, dammit. Well, as long as I’ve gone ahead and mentioned them, it’s important to recognize, I think, that this is precisely the sort of inadequate response by overwhelmed local authorities in the wake of a large-scale disaster that argues for a robust, rapid response by federal authorities. Which, obviously, we didn’t get in this case.)

I didn’t link to it before (so many stories, so little time), but you’ve probably already heard about how, during Dick Cheney’s tour of the Katrina damage the other day, someone shouted out, “Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney,” prompting a reporter to ask Cheney the delicious question, “Do you hear that a lot?”

Heh.

Anyway, here’s the video from Norm of Onegoodmove: Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney.

And here’s the reason I’m actually posting it now: Ben Marble, the guy who did the shouting, is holding an eBay auction to sell video of the event: DVD of me saying “GO **** YOURSELF” to DICK CHENEY.

More information is available from Marble’s website: Hurricane Katrina sucked! Also here, at OpEdNews.com: Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney’s M-16-carrying Goons.

Update: Links fixed, per comments by Sven. Thanks. I’m not sure what happened with the OpEdNews.com link; that was probably my error. In the case of eBay, they apparently have (twice, now) deleted the auction because of people complaining about it, or something. But the link above currently works.

Later update: And now the eBay link has been fixed yet again. That makes at least 3 times, by my count, that they’ve killed the auction, apparently without telling the guy why. Makes me wonder what their specific objection is.