Guest Post by Morbo
You have to love the optimism of the European media. As the floodwaters in New Orleans slowly recede, some commentators are speculating that this time, President George W. Bush might actually be held accountable.
The disaster and the utter failure of the Bush administration to address it are being treated as a seminal turning point in American politics, a defining moment that will ripple across the body politic and bring us to a new and better place.
Johann Hari, writing in the London Independent, succinctly lays out the case against Bush: he ignored the warnings that the levees were weak, he slashed the Army Corps of Engineering funding that could have fixed them, he attacked FEMA’s budget, he myopically insisted that another terrorist attack was more likely than a natural disaster, he cut taxes for the rich in lieu of investing in infrastructure. Hari concludes:
“A limp, passive government serving only corporate interests cannot solve problems, whether it is a hurricane or the slow-motion crisis of American poverty or chaos in Iraq. So could a natural disaster reveal this and jolt Americans out of their thirty-year long slide into small government consolation?…. Could a new American liberalism arise from the fetid waters of New Orleans once again?”
Sigh. In a country where people were smart and rational and fundamentally decent, yes, that’s exactly what would happen. Unfortunately, the United States is none of those things right now.
It must be hard for Europeans. They sit across the pond, see the utter ineptitude of the Bush administration and know exactly what they would do: clean house. It’s so obvious. Yet it does not happen here, and they can only wonder why.
Bush and his gang, led by the incorrigible Karl Rove, have already decided how to play this one: Shift the blame to state and local authorities. Subtly blame the victims. Play the race card. (That always goes over well in red state America.) Work the conservative media.
It’s already working. Polls have emerged showing that most people don’t blame Bush for the post-hurricane mess.
Yet Bush is exactly the one to blame. After all, it was his short-sighted policies and inept appointments that brought the anemic response.
Consider the case of Michael Brown, whom New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called “the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA.” Brown admitted he was unaware there were 15,000 thirsty, hungry people trapped in the New Orleans Convention Center. That alone should have qualified him for a pink slip. Writes Dowd:
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
Dowd writes pointedly, but I fear incorrectly, that Bush and Co. “shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.”
Would that it were so. It amazes me that after five years plus of the Bush Gang, some journalists still “misunderestimate” him. This is a man who never admits a mistake, a man surrounded by the most craven partisan political operatives imaginable, a man who completely and utterly lacks any shred of a conscience, a man who cares about one thing and one thing only: the acquisition and maintenance of power for the most extreme elements of his party. They will say and do anything to hold on to that power, and if it means lying through their teeth, shifting the blame to innocent people and engineering phony good news, so be it.
Bush went to New Orleans and said inane and offensive things. On the way down, he said he was looking forward to the visit, then realized that was a dumb thing to say and said he wasn’t. Once on the ground, he reminisced about partying there. He made a few cursory visits with victims in one of the nicer shelters, then told everyone he was leaving but that he would not forget them. It was without a doubt the lamest performance by a president during a natural disaster ever and illustrated the depths to which this man is hopelessly out of his element.
Not much to work with there, right? But Bush doesn’t have to burnish his reputation on his own. If he did, we would have been shed of him a long time ago. What saves him is that he has the most cynical team of political jackals the world has ever known at his side. They are no match for progressives, many of whom foolishly continue to believe in the inherent decency of humankind.
That Bush team knows it has a powerful ally on its side: the natural cluelessness of much the nation. They know that if you repeat something enough, with sufficient force, many Americans will start to believe it — no matter how outlandish or disconnected from the truth it is.
Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself this: What percentage of the American public still believes Saddam Hussein was tied to Sept. 11, 2001?
Even now, as corpses are dragged out of wretched waters of New Orleans, as the sick and elderly die and newly minted orphans cry themselves to sleep at night in squalid shelters, even as desperate people wander the streets looking for missing loved ones or pack themselves into tents in strange cities, Team Bush has its priorities straight — not helping the victims, of course, but finding ways to pin the blame for their total and abject failure on someone else.
Watch them work their magic in the days and weeks to come. Watch them and be disgusted. But above all, be ashamed. Be very ashamed.