BLAMING THE LOCALS

That’s the Bush strategy. And the local authorities did indeed fail badly with respect to mobilizing resources to evacuate the poorer parts of the threatened city while they still could. No criticism I’ve made of the federal response should be inferred to say I think the locals performed well. They didn’t. But a disaster of this magnitude is obviously beyond the scope of a single mayor or governor. And it became clear very quickly to anyone with a modem or a TV that a disaster was happening. The federal officials are on record denying the calamity even as CNN and Fox were broadcasting it. Chertoff is still denying that anyone foresaw such a scenario even as Brown has said they were on the verge of a plan for dealing with it; and anyone with Google can see umpteen predictions, warnings and analysis of just such a scenario for years. The president told Diane Sawyer that no one anticipated the breach of the levees – about the dumbest thing he has said since the “Mission Accomplished” fiasco. Today, the WaPo, in the piece cited above, has this: “As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.” Hmm. As a reader pointed out, the record shows she did such a thing the previous Saturday. And that Bush had declared one the next day. When the administration’s excuses are this patently thin – and contradict each other – you know that this time, even Karl Rove cannot blame someone else.