The Battle of New Orleans
The desperate people hunkered down amid the sewage and corpses in New Orleans don’t have power, telephones — or TVs.
The phantom aid stations, the disappearing construction equipment, the held-up evacuation buses, the whole array of briefings, pressers, backgrounders, and leaks are simply opening salvos in the real Battle of New Orleans — the struggle to somehow salvage Bush’s reputation — even his legitimacy as president — from the debacle.
Adam Nagourney provided the behind-the-scenes excuse for Bush’s obtuse sock puppet performance in Katrina’s aftermath:
The president’s brains were missing.
Cheney was on vacation and key aides were off for a wedding party in Greece. Apparently Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, guardians of the inner temple where the coarse clay of George Bush is magically transformed into stupefying infallible godhead, were somehow out of reach as well.
Thanks, Nags. That’s not going to help Bush look more leaderly.
We were reassured that the nation’s grey matter has returned to Washington rested and refreshed, so that Rove & Co. can play catchup in the most important struggle — the battle to shift blame to the local Democrats, personified by Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco.
The Washington Post picked up the narrative of the campaign, and in the process credulously retailed the quickly refuted smear that Blanco had neglected to declare a state of emergency.
The White House might well believe that people will remember the lie and not notice the retraction.
They also want people to get the message that the Mordor-like eye of Rove has, through the ever-compliant and fatal media lens, fixed its implacable gaze on the hapless Blanco, and her potential friends, supporters, and sympathizers should melt away before Karl’s rage fries them to a crisp together with her.
Blanco’s going to have a hard time gaining political and administrative traction if the federal government is conspicuously out to undermine her.
The effort to turn Blanco into Dead Pol Walking continues with the White House trying to keep Blanco out of the loop and off-camera for Dear Leader’s current round of disaster photo-ops.
Bush has no doubt developed one of his patented vicious grudges against Blanco, who committed a mortal affront by appointing James Lee Witt — FEMA’s golden boy from the Clinton years, and a direct reproach to the incompetence and malign neglect of Bush and “Brownie” - as Louisiana’s consultant for disaster relief.
Now Bush can gladly and self-righteously sabotage coordination of the relief effort and justify a showdown so the feds seize full control of the relief effort, the propaganda — and the inevitable investigations.
However, the revelations about Rove strips away one of the most important defenses in the Bush arsenal - “we’re above politics, that’s just partisan sniping” - against criticism of Bush’s increasingly manifest incompetence on national security issues, just when he needs that shield the most.
For Bush, Katrina is going to be all politics all the time.
Like everything else.
But this time the American public and media might not have the stomach for it.
Bush is a moral idiot and incompetent manager, and his administration is grinding to a halt in his second term as it tries haplessly to outrun the consequences of his bad choices and wrong decisions from Iraq to the Social Security boondoggle.
But that’s not why Katrina was such a disaster.
It was because Bush didn’t care.
And America knows it.
Billmon made the important and overlooked point that the Bush administration can do a good job of anticipation, preparation, and remediation — when a hurricane strikes a critical swing state run by the president’s brother in an election year.
The government’s failures before and after Katrina don’t reflect exalted ideas of the superiority of limited government, a noble but misplaced emphasis on terror instead of natural disasters by the Department of Homeland Security, or even good old-fashioned bureaucratic incompetence.
Katrina was the natural outcome of crony politics when a natural disaster occurs in a place where the administration has no cronies — or interests — to protect.
I see distinct “What, Me Worry?” parallels between 9/11 and Katrina.
My feeling about 9/11 has been that, if “Bush Knew”, he expected an al-Qaeda attack but didn’t care. He knew it would provide the provocation needed to arouse his base, bolster his leadership, and provide the pretext for his preexisting plan to attack Iraq and remake the Middle East through military force.
What he didn’t expect was that, instead of a relatively small-scale offshore attack against remote American military or diplomatic interests or some contemptible low-tech truck-bomb outrage within the U.S. that would allow him to cook up a war against Iraq as the ostensible organizer of “state-sponsored terrorism” at his leisure, al Qaeda would come up with a horrific master-stroke that galvanized American resolve and set George astride an imperial military tiger he had neither the will nor character to control.
So the last four years have been an exercise in escalating cover-up of Bush’s pre-9/11 inaction and duplicity, even as Bush reaped and then spectacularly squandered the political fruit of the attack.
My feeling about Katrina is also that “Bush Knew” and didn’t care. Instead of expending government resources on evacuation and prepositioning of relief supplies and resources, the attitude was “Let it come” - and let the White House winnow the hassles from the opportunities afterward.
In both cases, the consequence of Bush’s callous indifference was thousands of lives lost and a national crisis he could exploit but, thanks to the limits of his imagination, energy, and decency, only partially resolve.
As the White House administers and rebuilds New Orleans, I wouldn’t be surprised if parallels to Iraq emerge.
If Bush seizes control of New Orleans, he’ll probably run it like Baghdad on the Mississippi, humiliating and angering the locals while he squanders billions on his well-connected buddies for the reconstruction in an immense, final, end-of-term payday.
I only hope that the 2006 elections serve as that “accountability moment” Bush has so smugly evaded, and somehow a Democratic Congress is installed and brings his administration to account for his arrogance, stupidity, and cupidity.
Maybe we’ll be calling the 2006 campaign “The Battle of New Orleans”.
Copyright 2005 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
