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Quoted! Wm. Kristol,
editor of the conservative Weekly
Standard and founding member of PNAC to the WaPo: “Almost
every Republican I have spoken with is disappointed" in Bush's response to
the disaster. "He is a strong president...but he has never really focused
on the importance of good execution. I think that is true in many parts of his
presidency." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-corn/katrina-kristol-admits-b_b_6928.html Balz: For
Bush, a deepening divide: No more “I’m a uniter, not a divider” "Bush
is the most partisan president in modern American history," said William
Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland and previously a top
domestic adviser to former President Bill Clinton. "As a result, voters in
both parties are focusing on him, rather than on the specifics of the policies." Osama and Katrina By Thomas L. Friedman,
NYT, September 7, 2005 On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was
interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush
administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall,
I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is
that they know how to pull the trigger." It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney
were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as
a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that
he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not
simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate
conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign
treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11
world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society. Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration,
Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back,
Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the
right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with
Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home. These
are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at
taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending
"intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy. For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real
policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word
"conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already
denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national
policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price
gouging? And then there are the president's standard lines:
"It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of
the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your
pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us:
"It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane." An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the
toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I
don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where
I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't
have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom
I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was
never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement
got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub
when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get
out of town. The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that
has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just
spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl
Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else
would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch. Besides ripping away the roofs of New
Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly
educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving
the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without
putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing. So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted
under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to
impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy
much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and
eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to
develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured;
and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to
incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam
at the same time. As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once
remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party." Well, the
party is over.
If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11
mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have
destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to
his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have
destroyed a city and a presidency. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html Dealing With Political Disaster By Dan Froomkin, Special to
washingtonpost.com, Tuesday, September 6, 2005; 1:21 PM President Bush somehow
missed the significance of what was happening on the Gulf Coast last week as he
and his political guru, Karl Rove, flitted between Texas and California and,
finally, Washington. But now,
facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of
other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in
campaign mode. This campaign is to
salvage Bush's reputation. Like previous Rove
operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled
environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of
Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners. It doesn't necessarily include any change in policy. It
certainly doesn't include any admission of error. It utilizes the classic
Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their
criticism -- and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press
off the scent. It calls for public expressions of outrage
over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the
"blame game." While at the same time, it is utterly political in
nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere. But in some ways, this
post-Katrina campaign poses Bush's aides with unprecedented challenges. The problem -- an achingly slow federal
response to what has turned out to be one of the greatest natural disasters
this country has ever faced -- can be traced at least in part to one of the
Bush White House's most defining characteristics: The protective bubble within which the president operates. Bush's aides
intentionally keep him mentally and physically aloof from any ugliness -- political
or otherwise. It lets them keep tight control over the presidential imagery and
stay on message. But inside his
bubble, Bush first failed to recognize what was becoming clear to almost anyone
watching the news: That Americans needed help. And in his two meticulously
staged visits to the Gulf Coast on Friday and Monday, it is precisely because Bush was kept so far
away from dissension or mess that he appeared so out of touch. He cracked jokes on
Friday, including one about his drinking days in New Orleans, but has yet to
confront the true horror of the situation so widely seen on TV. He has yet to
acknowledge the disgrace of a major American city being rendered uninhabitable
on his watch. He has yet to come face to face with people left to suffer for
days in hellish conditions and explain to them why their government failed
them. And he has yet to demonstrate the strength that Americans require from
their president in a time of crisis. This crisis finds the president looking
impotent at best, incompetent at worst. And there is an element of whining to Bush's refusal to
shoulder his responsibility -- especially should the press continue to make it
clear how intensely he and his top aides are trying to pass the buck. The men behind Bush's bubble are clearly hoping that their tried and
true methods will serve them well yet again and that over time, Bush's
reputation will recover. But with
every body removed from the attics of New Orleans over the coming weeks,
America will remember the colossal failure of government to protect its people. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html The 'Stuff Happens' Presidency By Harold Meyerson, Wednesday,
September 7, 2005; A25 We're not number one.
We're not even close. By which
measures, precisely, do we lead the world? Caring for our countrymen? You jest.
A first-class physical infrastructure? Tell that to New Orleans. Throwing so
much money at the rich that we've got nothing left over to promote the general
welfare? Now you're talking. The problem goes
beyond the fact that we can't count on our government to be there for us in
catastrophes. It's that a can't-do spirit, a shouldn't-do spirit, guides the
men who run the nation. Consider the congressional testimony of Joe Allbaugh,
George W. Bush's 2000 campaign manager, who assumed the top position at FEMA in
2001. He characterized the organization as "an oversized entitlement
program," and counseled states and cities to rely instead on
"faith-based organizations . . . like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite
Disaster Service." Is it any surprise,
then, that the administration's response to the devastation in New Orleans is
of a piece with its response to the sacking of Baghdad once our troops arrived?
"Stuff happens" was the way Don Rumsfeld described the destruction of
Baghdad's hospitals, universities and museums while American soldiers stood around.
Now stuff has happened in New Orleans, too, even as FEMA was turning away
offers of assistance. This is the stuff-happens administration. And it's
willing, apparently, to sacrifice any claim America may have to national
greatness rather than inconvenience the rich by taxing them to build a more
secure nation. As a matter of social policy, the
catastrophic lack of response in New Orleans is exceptional only in its scale
and immediacy.
When it comes to caring for our fellow countrymen, we all know that America has
never ranked very high. We are, of course, the only democracy in the developed
world that doesn't offer health care to its citizens as a matter of right. We
rank 34th among nations in infant mortality rates, behind such rival
superpowers as Cyprus, Andorra and Brunei. But these are chronic
conditions, and even many of us who argue for universal health coverage have
grown inured to that distinctly American indifference to the common good, to
our radical lack of solidarity with our fellow citizens. Besides, the poor
generally have the decency to die discreetly, and discretely -- not
conspicuously, not in droves. Come rain or come shine, we leave millions of
beleaguered Americans to fend for themselves on a daily basis. It's just a lot
more noticeable in a horrific rain, and when the ordinary lack of access to
medical care is augmented by an extraordinary lack of access to emergency
services. Even if we'll never
win the national-greatness sweepstakes for solidarity, though, we've long been
the model of the world in matters infrastructural, in roads, bridges and dams
and the like. But
the America in which Eisenhower the Good decreed the construction of the
interstate highway system now seems a far-off land in which even conservatives
believed in public expenditures for the public good. The radical-capitalist
conservatives of the past quarter-century not only haven't supported the public
expenditures, they don't even believe there is such a thing as the public good. Let the Dutch build their dikes through
some socialistic scheme of taxing and spending; that isn't the American way. Here, the business of government is to let
the private sector create wealth -- even if that wealth doesn't circulate where
it's most needed. So
George W. Bush threw trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest
Americans, and what did they do with it? Did the Walton family up in
Bentonville raise the levees in New Orleans? Did the Bass family over in Texas
write a tax-deductible check to the Mennonites for the billions of dollars they
would need to rescue the elderly from inundated nursing homes? Even now, with
bedraggled rescuers pulling decomposed bodies from the muck of New Orleans,
Bill Frist, the moral cretin who runs the U.S. Senate, wanted its first order
of business this week to be the permanent repeal of the estate tax, until the
public outcry persuaded him to change course. The Republicans profess belief in
trickle-down, but what they've given us is the Flood. The world looks on in
stunned amazement, unable to understand how a once great nation has grown so
indifferent not just to its poor and its blacks but even to the most
rudimentary self-preservation. Some of it is institutional racism, but the primary culprit
is the economic libertarianism that the president still espouses whenever he
sells his Social Security snake oil. It's that libertarianism, more than
anything else, that has transformed a great city into an immense morgue. But, hey -- stuff
happens. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/06/AR2005090601363.html? |
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