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”.
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.
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.
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.”
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:
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.
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.
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:
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).
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.
Some of the wilder TV moments I’ve seen in the past few days:
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:
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).
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.
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:
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?
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