Germany--Joschka Fischer steps down.  What does this mean?

Fischer made clear that he would remain at the head of his party only under the most extreme circumstances. As far as he was concerned, it didn't make any sense for the Greens to be in any of the possible governing coalitions under discussion. Still, he said he would continue to take part in the negotiations, as long as it had to do with governing.

Hard to tell what all of this means.  Thoughts?

The candidate: Gerhard Schroeder

The Playbook:   Bush/Cheney 2000.

"There will be no coalition under her leadership with my Social Democrats," Mr Schröder said, glaring at his opponent across the table. "Apart from me, no one is in a position to form a stable government."

Mrs Merkel squirmed in her chair.

"I sent her a letter this morning, which should be there if her fax machine is working," said Franz Münterfering, the leader of the SPD. "Then we got a call from her office asking if we could talk."

She's already beat.

However, 50 percent of those polled said they feared the federal government would spend too much on reconstruction, and 45 percent said Americans should make "major sacrifices" to pay for the effort. But only 20 percent said they would be willing to make those sacrifices themselves.

Seventeen percent said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to support reconstruction efforts, while 15 percent favored financing the cost with more deficit spending. Six percent said they would pay for reconstruction efforts with cuts in domestic spending.

Seriously, we have to qualify for the most unrealistic electorate ever.  They want everything, but they don't want to pay for a dime of it.

Oh and:

Bush's overall job approval number was 40 percent, with 58 percent of those surveyed telling pollsters they disapproved of his performance in office. It is the second time his approval rating has hit that low a mark.

His personal qualities hit fresh lows: Only 49 percent called him a strong and decisive leader, down from 54 percent in July and 51 percent in August. Just 42 percent said he cares about people like themselves, and 47 percent called him honest and trustworthy.

GOP legislative priorities: There has to be some poor businessman killed by Katrina who we can use to sell that estate tax repeal?

NBC's Brian Williams notes in his blog this morning that there was much jubilation in New Orleans when the lights came on 30 minutes before the President's motorcade arrived for his speech last night.... and much disappointment when they turned everything off an hour after he left.  Probably looked good on TV, though?

Need to rebuild the Gulf Coast?  Who would you call to oversee such a massive undertaking?  Maybe somebody with some sort of experience managing such a massive reconstruction project?  Well if you're the President you evidently look to your chief political operative, Karl Rove. 

I don't know how the reconstruction effort will go but I think you can expect a lot of staged events, speeches, no-bid contracts for political supporters (ie. Republicans), sudden federal investigations to discredit meddling local officials (ie. Democrats) and just the right juxtaposition of images of our decisive and resolute Commander in Chief walking around the Gulf Coast for the next couple years.  Genius!

In the comments here, a battle has raged as to who is responsible for the mess in Louisiana.  We've focused mainly on the political aspects of the question, without getting much into the who did what when side of things.  What has come through on this and other blogs is that conservatives believe that it is the liberals and the media who are trying to play the "blame game."  The reality is much different, however. 

The Republicans had looked to place blame squarely at the feet of Governor Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.  Since Nagin and Blanco had complained about the federal response, they were fair game in the eyes of the White House.  Its politics, after all.

But now ominous rumblings seem to indicate that a new phase of the blame game is in order.  Bush is now looking to exploit the tragedy to go after his traditional foes and burnish his image.  This makes sense given the name of the person who is running the operation to reconstruct New Orleans: Karl Rove.

That's right, the President's political eminence grise, Rove, is handling the operational task of rebuilding a city shattered by a killer storm.  Not a construction expert, or someone with experience running a large government organization, but a political operative with no governmental executive experience.  Hell, Michael Brown has more experience than Rove in these matters.

And what are the first results of this assignment?  Politics as usual, baby.  Contrary to his words of last night, Bush is going on a witch hunt to try and remove responsibility from his shoulders: Take this E-mail sent out by the Department of Justice to the U.S. Attorneys across the country:

SUBJECT: Have you had any cases involving the levees in New Orleans?

QUESTION: Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps' work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.

District: __________
Contact: _________
Telephone: ________

 Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

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.