This is a picture of George W. Bush writing a note to Condi Rice at the U.N. today:

From Reuters.

Germany's Gerhard Schroeder.  Told you.

The Ironmouth Editors dare J. Scott Barnard:(From an E-mail to J. Scott).

Ok, a dare for you--post a link to the non-partisan report by Congress' Investigative Arm, the Congressional Research Service indicating that Governor Blanco took every step needed under federal law to get help from the Federal government on August 27, 2005.  http://www2.dccc.org/docs/conyersgaokatrina.pdf

Thanks,

Rob

I got this E-mail from prolific commenter J. Scott Barnard today:

Rob:I dare you to prove that you have at least an ounce of objectivity by posting about this Democratic congressman's abuse of power to distract emergency services for personal use while people were drowning in N.O. I suspect you'll ignore it.

Well, we have a bit more of an ounce of objectivity:

On Sept. 2 — five days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast — Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., who represents New Orleans and is a senior member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was allowed through the military blockades set up around the city to reach the Superdome, where thousands of evacuees had been taken.

Military sources tells ABC News that Jefferson, an eight-term Democratic congressman, asked the National Guard that night to take him on a tour of the flooded portions of his congressional district. A 5-ton military truck and a half dozen military police were dispatched.

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard tells ABC News that during the tour, Jefferson asked that the truck take him to his home on Marengo Street, in the affluent uptown neighborhood in his congressional district. According to Schneider, this was not part of Jefferson's initial request.

But we're not the only liberal blog reporting this story either: Josh Marshall calls it:

Iffy and Mysterious

Why?  Because Jefferson is under investigation for corruption, another fact reported by a liberal blog. 

However, as for having an ounce of objectivity, I refer readers to Jeff Blanco's Louisiana Conservative, whose rantings could never be accused of being liberal and whose editor is facing Katrina head on:

On last thing, Rob at Ironmouth did a good job of being critical of the president without politicizing the trajedy. Rob, I personally want to thank you for that.

Speaking of politicizing the tragedy, why does George Bush hate America? 

I liked Kerry's quote too:  

"The President has done the obvious, only after it was clear he couldn’t get away with the inexcusable."

Why the big "I take responsibility" headline at CNN?  Because after all the major screw-ups of the past five years this is our CEO President's first acknowledgement that he is actually responsible when his government has so clearly failed.  There was really no getting around it and its pretty sad it took the man so long to admit it but there's not much you can do when that take-charge, decisive, mans-man reputation your PR people created falls apart in such a big way.  The funny thing is that only a couple months ago he was telling people he was looking for some sort of new big idea, event or crutch to show he still mattered and along comes Katrina and he still didn't take it seriously.

Since this calculated act of contrition comes after a week of lame excuse making (remember yesterday it was the meteorologist's fault he thought "the bullet was dodged"?) and a floundering full court press to shift blame entirely to authorities on the Gulf coast, I think its fair to say that the man is desparately trying to at least stem his loss of support, and yes, the collapse in his poll numbers.

Mark Schmitt again shows why he might be the most thoughtful of the bloggers, someone who understands both the policy and the politics.  Take his insight on the Rove System:

Rove recognizes that there's a lot you can get away with if you just act like you can get away with it, especially if you raise the stakes, and as a result he moves with much greater freedom. It seems to me that part of their genius is they've gotten rid of much of the "you just can't do that" mentality of politics, and stripped everything down to the bare essence of what they can get away with.

One of my biggest worries is that that's a genie that will be very hard to put back in the bottle. Politics, like much of civilization, depends on the existence of some unquestioned, "it just isn't done" customs. An example that I've mentioned a couple times is the explicity theory, proven once again in the CAFTA vote, that you want to pass a bill with as narrow a margin as possible, because every vote over 218 in the House is wasted and might represent a compromise. That's not something that legislative strategists ever thought before -- they wanted to go into votes with the most comfortable margin, and to win with enough to have a clear endorsement against future challenges. And I'm convinced that Bush/Rove brought that same mindset to the presidential campaign. Most incumbents would want to have a nice Reagan-in-1984-type landslide in order to feel a clear mandate. But Rove/Bush thought that of every vote above 51% as a wasted concession; they knew that all Bush had to do was win, and he could declare the mandate.

So "accountability" means understanding one of the two or three things that they do care about, and beating them on those things.

There can only be one result of such an uncompromising system--Untergang.  This German word literally means "going under", but as the title of a recent movie it was translated as "Downfall."  Essentially this is a millenial or eschatological idea--rather than try to get everyone to go along, you will go absolutely as far as you want without stopping, consequences be damned.  Others will pick up the pieces.

The idea is a terrible one for our country, however.  The greatest force for world stability has been the United States.  The reason for that stability is that our democratic republic has forced compromise upon the factions which compete for control of the political appartus of the country.  Thus, there were no great shifts precipitated by individuals or factions.  Everything was eventually subject to the collective wisdom of millions of voters who, amongst the noise of their collected opinions, found a theme which was slow and stable.

Now all of that is gone.  The problem with such a 'consequences be damned' system is that it creates political pressures within the controlling group which tend to drive it to extremes.  The infighting is vicious and like the French Revolution or Stalin's purges, it leads to terrible policy decisions driven more by the leader's style than rational policy goals which serve the country and its people.  Commenters here have been saying for a long time that Bush doesn't care about the polls.   Its finally becoming clear that he does not.  But unlike the commenters, I think the fact that Bush doesn't follow the polls is a development which has been bad for the country.

The eventual result of such a system must be a total flameout.  The question is what will that flameout bring?

PZ Meyers rips the boys over at Powerline:

If we're going to accept Hindrocket's premise that wealthy, small-government nations are environmentalist countries most effective at dealing with environmental disasters, the lesson of Katrina must be that we are a poor country afflicted with a corrupt and excessive government.

Our conservative government.

From this weeks Time:

A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President's increasing isolation. Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term. "Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, 'All right. I understand. Good job.' He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom."

But as the Bush era begins to wane, some remaining aides lack the chops to set him right when he is off course. Several of his closest advisers--including Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales and Karen Hughes--have left the West Wing for Cabinet posts or jobs in other agencies. His chief of staff, Andrew Card, has never been mistaken for James Baker, the man who made a minor career out of setting Bush's father right. And Bush has filled a number of lesser spots around the government with political hacks and patronage candidates--most embarrassingly Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who was yanked from on-site supervision of Katrina on Friday.

"Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House," said a lobbyist who is tight with the Administration. "You can't have a Mike Brown at FEMA unless you can guarantee that there isn't going to be a catastrophe."

The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news can prevail over bad--even when there is a surfeit of evidence to the contrary.

And from Newsweek's How Bush Blew It:

Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

The end of the piece lays the problem bare:

Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has an article in which Karen Hughes, Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Dept. is making the case that it was the crime and looting, not the slow government response to Katrina, that the world finds so objectionable despite the fact that most foreign coverage has actually centered on the slow response. 

I suppose in Karen's world we can separate the two, but what I do find objectionable is that in the much wider realm of all that happened on the Gulf Coast last week her preoccupation with crime and lawlessness betrays a much larger concern for domestic politics and shaping opinion here at home over her actual job which had something to do with improving America's image abroad.  Its almost like they created the post to keep her close by in case the President has a PR problem he can't solve?

Since her method in the past consisted of mind-numbing message discipline and relentlessly browbeating or threatening to cut off access to reporters who question that message it should be interesting to see if the rest of the international community comes around to Ms. Hughe's point of view.

Interesting snippet from the NY Daily News article on Bush's PR disaster:

Some top Bush aides think a brand-name disaster boss like Giuliani, dubbed "America's Mayor" for his leadership after 9/11, or former secretary of state Colin Powell would remind Americans of the administration's sluggish initial response to the hurricane.

"You don't want someone overshadowing the President," said an official in the "ride it out" camp. "That leaves him looking weak."

The "ride it out" camp has been running the show for some time.  The President has shown a remarkable power to ignore huge policy problems because to address them might make it appear that he has made a mistake.  The result is the twin disasters of Iraq and Katrina. 

Essentially, this results in a selling out of every policy goal in a plan to preserve political capital.  Nothing gets done and the President loses political capital daily, and the power to fix the very problems that he is creating and not fixing.  In the end, it results in a perverse reversal of the priorities a president should have--he or she should use political capital to solve the problems the country faces.  But when the political capital is so closely protected that nothing gets done, the entire purpose of the exercise is lost.  It is almost as if he is setting himself up to run for a higher office--but there is none, save perhaps, Commissioner of Major Leauge Baseball.

Ironically, if Bush could step up and admit his mistakes, the country would surely forgive him and Democrats might be wrong-footed going into the 2006 midterm elections.  Don't look for it to happen.

I heard about this earlier today but Think Progress has the video of a Gulfport, MS resident yelling, "Go f*ck yourself, Mr Cheney....". 

By the way, seeing Cheney thrown into action once again makes me think Jon Stewart is right when he says it seems like Bush only knows three people in his entire administration, Rice and Rove being the other two...

Yes, the House just approved the $51 billion aid package for victims of Hurricane Katrina and 11 conservative Republicans of high moral and political principles voted NO. 

The other day I said I thought that Congressional Republicans weren't really serious about a special House-Senate Conference to look into Katrina and of course a few hours later Hastert and Frist were in front of the microphone.  What hasn't been mentioned very much is that none of the Democratic leadership of either the House or Senate were invited nor does it appear they were even consulted.  If Sam Rosenfeld's piece in Tapped is any indication it appears that Frist and Hastert really aren't very serious about any sort of meaningful bipartisan investigation of Katrina.  Did I mention the Democrats are so pissed that Pelosi and Reid are saying they won't participate?

Hurricane Katrina's power not only destroyed an entire city, it caused a number of people to make absolutely moronic statements.  Take CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, whose on-the-air Jimmy the Greek moment thus far has been given a mysterious free pass by the media, the likes of which are usually reserved to the Bush Administration.  "You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black . . . ."

Blitzer's gaffe can be excused since he was forced to speak sans teleprompter, which is like permitting a blind man to fly a commerical jet.  But the following social commentary was posted by that self-absorbed, academe dufus Glenn Reynolds, who argued that every household should stockpile supplies in preparation for a disaster: 

Whenever I say this, I get responses along the lines of "poor people can't afford to stockpile food." But here's a family survival kit for $50 (link omitted) and it's pretty good. Most poor people in America can afford food (that's why so many poor people are fat). They do have other problems that make preparation less likely, though (if you're the kind of person who thinks ahead and prepares for emergencies, you're much less likely to be poor to begin with) and local authorities have to be ready . . . .

And this man is a law professor, teaching the impressionable (read gullible) minds at the University of Tennessee Law School in subjects such as Constitutional Law and the very practical Space Law.  Note: The survival kit Reynolds referred to included 12 cans of Dinty Moore beef stew.

To Professor Reynolds I pose the following in the Socratic method: Have you lost your fucking mind?

This is going to be hard to believe for some in the IRONMOUTH community, but it looks like the House Leadership has torpedoed any House hearings on the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in favor of partisan posturing and some vague House-Senate conference proposal that will probably never happen.  No real official explanation of why they once again have abdicated their government oversight responsibilities but unofficially some point to the fact that many committees with oversight functions are still recovering from overwork during the Clinton administration.  In fact, former Government Affairs Committee chairman Dan Burton, IN (R) is said to have run out of interesting prop ideas and novel ways of proving imaginary crimes a full six years ago. 

It took five years, but Thomas Friedman of the New York Times finally broke down and wrote an op-ed piece critical of the Bush Administration and its conservative agenda.  What he still doesn't get, however, is that Bush's 9-11 mandate was completely undeserving.  He writes that his "gut reaction" told him that Bush and Cheney were the "right guys to deal with Osama," but then he disparages the Bush Administration for using 9-11 to push through what he describes as a "radically uncompassionate conservative agenda."  But Friedman fails to mention the quagmire in Iraq, the failure in Afghanistan, and the fact that Bush and Cheney not only never dealt with Osama, they could care less about Osama.  He fails to admit his gut was wrong.

The Bush Administration's ineptitude in their tragic mishandling of Hurricane Katrina should not be surprising.  It's de rigeur.  Bush and Cheney were never the "right guys" to deal with Osama or anything else of importance.  When it comes to raising campaign funds, they're the "right guys."  When it comes to applying that ol' Texas saying of "dance with the one that brung you" to the world of politics, they're the "right guys."  When it comes to manipulating the likes of Thomas Friedman and others in the press with Orwelian tactics, they're the "right guys."

If Thomas Friedman still cannot come to this all too obvious conclusion following Hurricane Katrina, my God, what will it take?  What other calamity must our nation endure before he and the majority of Americans finally have an epiphany?

Jonah Goldberg at NRO's the Corner:

. . .what I objected to, and still object to, is the reflexive playing of the class card. Is it really true that some middle class retirees who heeded the advice of the government to leave town, only to watch their homes be looted after a lifetime of hardwork for a better life are suffering less than a poor person who lost his rented apartment? What's the metric for measuring this sort of suffering? What about the small businessman who worked his entire life to build something he's proud of? What about the families who lost loved ones, but had the poor taste to make more money than the poverty line?

Jonah gets property values messed up with human values.  Let's face it, the tragedy facing New Orleans' poor has very little to do with the loss of their "rented apartments" and a lot more to do with the loss of their lives.  I've seen very little out there about the "loss of apartments" or even homes (Trent Lott's excepted) and very much about the destruction of human life. 

And that's where the poor are getting victimized.  Because they do not possess the same resources as those better off, they could not flee the city when Katrina approached.  Therefore, many died from drowning, lack of medical care and perhaps violence.  This isn't about the loss of rented apartments.  Its about the loss of life.  Jonah needs to know that the "metric" for measuring that is the same for each one of us.

Since some conservative pundits are on hold awaiting Katrina talking-points I've notices those who are moving on the "attack local authorities" meme are often using past events like 9/11 as a measure of local leadership.  That's fine, but I propose we look at past examples of federal leadership in times of crisis or massive natural disaster and I still find this administration's performance horseshit.  For those of you who want to practice this past analogy line of attack try this:  Remember all the looters and hungry abandoned people during the Mississippi Flood of 1993 and how it took FEMA four days to get relief to them?  Oh, that's right it didn't happen.   

Think Progress takes us through who would replace Mike Brown as head of FEMA and its not pretty... unless you need somebody to provide event planning for the President's political campaigns.