The Dish

His nomination of Roberts for Chief Justice seems like a strange gamble for me. Someone who has not yet been on the Court should now be leading it? I know there are precedents, but this strikes me as a way to buy time. I know the polls are showing limited damage to the president. But it is a given at times like this that people rally to their president. They haven’t. So Bush reaches for safety. Deeper down, the crisis is worse. We face a perilous few years. Bush has just given notice to al Qaeda and others that this country is utterly unprepared for a possible terrorist calamity; and the people of the country have at best luke-warm confidence in their commander-in-chief. I take no pleasure whatever in this scenario. We are both deepy divided and deeply demoralized about the effectiveness of American government. That’s not how you win a war.

He said Katrina’s impact on New Orleans’ levees was unexpected. The man who briefed him before Katrina hit says otherwise. Is Chertoff simply lying his way out of trouble?

Zarqawi gains control of a key town on the Syrian border.

“MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn’t the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn’t they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

MR. BROUSSARD: . . . Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA–we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America–American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.” – from yesterday’s “Meet The Press.”

Four words: Fire Michael Brown Now. (Hat tip: Judith.)

My take in the Sunday Times.

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.

Here’s a great blog post about the blithering idiot, Michael “heck of a job” Brown, hired with no credentials to run a critical agency at a time of national peril. I guess some of us pundits bear the blame. We should have known that someone who had been fired for being unable to run an Arabian Horse Association had the job of responding to a national disaster in the war on terror. He was hired because a Bush crony, Joe Allbaugh (also hired because he was a major Bush fundraiser) liked him. The good ol’ boy network at its most brazen. If the president wants to recover even a little from what has happened to his reputation, he has to fire Brown. Now. That’s the test of whether he gets it. Not his furrowed brow press conferences. Not his spin. Not the desperate attempts by Republican partisans – once again! – to blame someone else down the chain of command. I don’t normally agree with Michelle Malkin, but she’s right on this one. I think we need the same blog pressure to get rid of Brown that we had with Trent Lott and Howell Raines. This is not a liberal-conservative issue. This is a competence issue. It’s a question of national security. Fire Brown now.

“Neoconservatism has always been an ideology dependent on the global projection of national power. What gave it its strength was that after 9/11, Americans were so angry at the assault that they wanted to go overseas and attack those responsible – thus was ‘The War on Terror’ born.
They were lied into thinking that the removal of Saddam Hussein would make the world a safer and more prosperous place. Clearly it hasn’t; if anything, you’re more at risk riding the Tube now than you were three years ago.
The lie has been shown not to stand up; and when that has not only failed but has been shown to have failed, what can an ideology based on the global projection of national power do when confronted with a crisis which shows it to be nationally powerless?
Nothing. The collapsed levees of New Orleans will have consequences for neoconservatism just as long and deep as the collapse of the Wall in East Berlin had on Soviet Communism; for when hacks and fulminators like John Podhoretz are openly criticizing the president, the Great Leader, the ideology is on the way out. And hopefully all of those who urged the ideology on, myself included, will have a long time to consider the error of our ways.’ – Martin Kelly, G-Gnome. I’m not as gloomy as Kelly is about the state of neoconservatism, but his little blog-essay is stimulating stuff.

“I spent my graduate school career studying hurricanes. At each conference I went to, starting in the late 90s, the panels talked about their thoughts on the most vulnerable city in America, on their nightmare scenario: it was always New Orleans. Sea water would inundate the city, overtaking thousands of people; toxic waste from Louisiana’s chemical industry would further foul the area, rendering it uninhabitable. It was not idle speculation; the strength of storm required to accomplish this is climatologically possible for much of the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. Do not be tricked into parsing overtopped vs. undermined levees – scientists have long known that ‘filling the bowl’ in New Orleans was likely with a strong hurricane. Even if preventing this was not possible, FEMA and other agencies should have had concrete plans on how to deal with this eventuality. They’ve been shown to have none that could get aid to the city faster than nearly 4 days after the storm ended.
I spent a few weeks at the end of my time in grad school working at one of NOAA’s Hurricane Research labs in Miami. Cabinets full of data gathered on reconnaissance flights sat, unexamined. There was no funding to have anyone go through the reams of data, gathered at high cost and risk to the scientists aboard the flights, even to be able to put it on the web for academic researchers to use. Several staff members told me that they’d love to be able to hire someone like me, but their funding was restricted because of the war in Iraq, and they would not be able to add any positions for several years, at least.”
I’m reminded of Ronald Reagan’s famous quip – and I paraphrase. Didn’t he say that the most frightening words in the English language were: “We’re the federal government and we’ve come to help.”

CNN – which has just had one of its finest hours – puts together a string of quotes from officials compared with what their own reporting showed at the time. The gap between Bush rhetoric and reality in America is stunning. Now transpose that to Iraq. And worry.

A SENATE VOTES: Missed in the Katrina coverage was an historic event: the California Senate passed a bill allowing gay couples the right to marry. The bill faces an uncertain future. But it does change the dynamics. For the first time, unprompted by a court, a state legislature has passed a marriage bill. The entire argument about judicial tyranny may soon disappear – and may evaporate if the Massachusetts legislature shelves a constitutional amendment later this month. Then we can have a substantive debate about marriage rights, and states’ rights. Conservatives whose only objection to equal marriage rights was the way in which they were being imposed will have to think again.