{"id":6938,"date":"2006-03-23T14:57:49","date_gmt":"2006-03-23T19:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6938"},"modified":"2006-03-23T14:57:49","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T19:57:49","slug":"external-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/external-events\/","title":{"rendered":"‘External events’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times ran yet another item<\/a> today on the idea that the White House staff is exhausted and getting sloppy — and probably needs some “relief pitchers” with fresh arms. But more importantly, the article included one paragraph that helped capture so much of what’s wrong with this White House.<\/p>\n

By most accounts inside and outside the administration, Mr. Rove is relentlessly cheerful, presenting himself as an optimistic face in a gloomy White House. One person who met Mr. Rove said he attributed Mr. Bush’s problems more to external events, in particular Hurricane Katrina and Iraq, than to anything the White House did wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, there are no quote marks around the comments, so the Times was paraphrasing someone who talked to Rove directly. But the very idea<\/i> that the White House would look at their colossal mistakes in Iraq and in response to Katrina as “external events” is truly breathtaking. (And at the same time, not terribly surprising.)<\/p>\n

I’d love a little follow-up on this. Does the White House consider the war and the inept response to Katrina as events that just “happened”? Does the Bush gang just look at these tragedies as unavoidable accidents? Do they not see any connection between the president’s policies\/decisions and the events themselves? I’m genuinely curious, because at this point, I’m not sure how they’d respond.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Bush’s idea of the “era of responsibility<\/a>” — where historic blunders are external events over which he has no control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times ran yet another item today on the idea that the White House staff is exhausted and getting sloppy — and probably needs some “relief pitchers” with fresh arms. But more importantly, the article included one paragraph that helped capture so much of what’s wrong with this White House. By most accounts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}