With Apologies to Lewis Carroll...

"Oh frabjous day, so long DeLay! He chortled in his joy."

Not that this is going to change anything substantial, but it's still rather nice to read.

Republican Manipulation Made Easy... and Funny!

Everybody needs to go read this piece by James Kroeger - it's an excellent breakdown of the kind of tools and methods that the Republicans tend to use to influence and dominate the perceptions of voters, especially swing voters, when the "Issues" debate breaks down and elections start becoming about voters' impressions of the candidates. Most of this isn't new, but this is one of the better expressions of such that I've read in a while.

A sample:

So it’s not the words we use, Democrats; it’s the emotions we show when we use particular words. Consider the phony outrage that Lynne & Dick Cheney expressed after the third debate. At a time when it was crucial for Kerry to continue to build momentum after a solid debate performance, his advisors ended up losing the post-debate spin. They lost it because they didn’t understand how crucial Kerry’s response would be and they didn’t understand how a candidate absolutely must respond to an Angry Outrage Performance if she wants to win. The big story that Swing Voters saw on TV the next day (those who didn’t watch the debate) was that the Cheneys were really angry that Kerry had called their daughter a lesbian on national TV. What turned this into a home run for the Republicans was Kerry’s unfortunate response; a written statement that sounded a lot like an apology. The overall impression this gave to Swing Voters was that Kerry had apparently done some “dirty politicking.” Then, after the Cheneys apparently called him on it, he offered [what sounded like] a weak apology and then tried to change the subject.

Whenever Democratic candidates are the target of a Republican politician’s expressed anger, it is crucial that they respond properly if they want to win The Image Campaign. Impressions formed during such confrontations are usually remembered on voting day. John Kerry should have responded emotionally by calling for a televised press conference, and then using the spotlight to laugh at the Cheneys’ phony display of anger. Laughter is the appropriate emotion for a candidate to feel and express when he is guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever. After laughing at the Cheneys, Kerry would then have been able to focus the media’s attention on the real story, which was/is the clever manipulations and deceptions that the Republicans always use to mislead voters. Anyone remember what Karen Hughes did to Al Gore in 2000 with the same kind of expressions of emotion (outrage, indignation)?

With this kind of response, Kerry would have told Swing Voters how they should respond to the reports they’re hearing. (Human Nature 101: people depend on you to tell them how to perceive you.) Generating a ‘rapid response’ doesn’t mean much if your response doesn’t communicate a message that will help your campaign. Additionally, holding a press conference would have given Kerry an opportunity to enjoy the humor of the situation with the members of the media who were present (it encourages the media to have a favorable impression of you as a candidate). In his initial remarks to the press, he would have wanted to smile broadly, shake his head, and express mild but sincere amusement at the Cheneys’ performance. Then, he would have wanted to review with good-humored stabs of ridicule the many times that the Cheneys had, themselves, mentioned their daughter’s lesbianism to the public.

Welcome to the realm of the Daily Show- THIS is why Jon Stewart has credibility to burn and is seen as so important politically. Comedy works. Mockery works. By making your opponent into a comical figure, you invalidate him and reinforce the division between him and potential voters. You don't need to be gifted at it, although it helps- what you need is to put across the impression that you think that the outrage is phony and ridiculous- that it's just transparently political gamesmanship.

In turn, it also reinforces the legitimacy of your own outrage. If you are perceived as being able to tell the difference between what is an obvious political tactic and a real issue, the issues that you bring up seriously will have their severity reinforced. That's why the most powerful moments on the Daily Show are when Jon puts away the comedy and drops the hammer on something that clearly REALLY ticks him off. That's how he got Crossfire cancelled and Tucker Carlson exiled from CNN.

That's also why Bill Hicks was such an amazing comedian.

There is a danger in people getting annoyed that you take something they consider important too lightly. That's why one needs to be careful to pick and choose what works politically and what doesn't. Rush Limbaugh's choice of comedic targets (he's not that funny, but he does delegitimize well) are made to maximize his reach among his targeted audience, accepting that he will alienate those who disagree. He doesn't care that feminists will be outraged by the "feminazi" label, for example- on the contrary, he can use it to reinforce his positions. He has more freedom than Republican politicians do, of course, but that's part of the game- commentators can and should go much farther than politicians, because they need not worry so much about alienation.

And, yes, this can win or lose elections. Ask any Canadian about the point where Stockwell Day "jumped the shark", and they'll tell you it was over the "Niagara Falls" controversy, where Day mixed up which direction the water flowed, and the controversy over young-earth creationism, where the fundamentalist Day was quoted as saying that he believed that dinosaurs and humans lived on earth at the same time. The dominant Liberal party ran with this all the way to another majority, laughing all the way.

Attempts by Day's party, years later, to paint Liberal leader Paul Martin as sympathetic to pedophiles was even more disastrous, and a textbook example of how to handle Rove-style tactics. The Liberal response was not pure outrage or (God forbid) a policy shift and/or apology, but a widespread mixture of amazed outrage and mockery.

Oddly enough, Canadian conservatives believed that they had a winning issue. After all, pedophilia is the worst taboo in the western world, but instead it doomed the party's chances of winning the government. The Liberals used the technique to paint the opposition Conservative party as a pack of opportunists and lunatics, either so out of touch as to actually believe that Paul Martin was a pedophile or so opportunistic as to make the claim as a cynical ploy. The attack was disasterous because the Liberals successfully turned the blade back on the Conservatives- PRECISELY the technique that Kroeger advocates!

Yes, folks, it works!

And that's just one small part of the essay. Kroeger has lots more. Go read it.

Edit: A pack of vicious cowardly thugs (who would be, no doubt, proud of the appellation) linked to this piece, attacking it through (as is usual) a rather inept "fisking" that substituted their own assumptions and prejudices for his own. I will not link to them; the site makes LGF look like the Well. Their inept rhetorical thrashings did, however, reveal two points worth response: swing voters aren't stupid, and that Democratic candidates don't actually stand for anything.

On the former, the problem is not stupidity but disengagement; it takes time to learn the complexity of issues, and those who haven't got the time but still want to choose a competent leader will rely on that thing that everybody believes they understand: morals and character. Not all swing voters decide this way, but enough do that it makes a large difference.

(Even if swing voters were dumb, however, there's no way the beneficiaries of that would every admit it. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, everybody's an idiot except those who agree with you: they are brilliant. Thus, the wankers lack credibility to judge.)

On the latter, I can only respond by saying that that's the problem you blind ignorant fool, but there is a difference between the candidates and the rank and file: the latter have verifiable and passionate beliefs. Even if you loathe and fear them, as these little fascist wankers do, you must acknowledge them.

For those criticizing NASA's "timing"...

Cutting NASA's budget will not feed poor people.

It will feed Lexus dealers.

Texas is in Deep, Deep Trouble

Rita's a Category 5, and it's on its way to Houston. The projections are of "massive devastation".

And because Houston, Galveston and Port Arthur are key to Texas' refinery capacity, we could be seeing $5-a-gallon gasoline.

Might I suggest filling up your tanks now?

Uselessness

Bill Scher and David Sirota have a pair of good articles about the utter failure of the media, the official Democratic party, and the Democratic establishment surrounding the party to do a damned thing to prevent the Republicans from railroading John Roberts to the Chief Justice position.

A while back I had said that if the Democrats don't do anything to block Roberts, they'll have demonstrated their weakness and lack of resolve. Lo and Behold. Once again, they come across as spineless and ineffective, thanks to a strategist class that fears confrontation and a political culture of fear in general. Once again, they are seen as having no committment to their principles. Once again, they give the American public little reason to believe that they're worth electing.

And, once again, they hadn't learned to SHUT THE HELL UP:

Yet, it was the same Democratic strategist class that helped create the perception in the first place that Roberts is "widely expected to win confirmation." If you recall, the very first day after the Roberts nomination was announced, Democratic strategists (most likely before they even gave a cursory review of Roberts' record) pitched a front page story to the Washington Post headlined "Democrats Say Nominee Will Be Hard to Defeat." Great strategy for a party that is perceived to stand for nothing: lead the biggest debate with an admission that you don't have enough guts to even make a fight of it.

I realize that I'm not a high-priced political consultant, but I think I speak for everybody when I say that the Dems need to learn to play their cards close to their chest, and not go blabbing to the Washington Post about everything that could possibly damage them.

The article linked quotes them as saying "they conceded [the nomination] could be hard to beat". Why on earth concede that? Why on earth concede anything? The press certainly isn't going to treat you any better- far from it. The Republicans don't do this. The inches of headline space it gets you aren't going to be complimentary. It cannot possibly be part of any winning political strategy- you won't get an ounce of credit with the public, which loves it when people take a doomed stand for what they believe in. Is anybody advocating this, or are they just not thinking?

With such ineptitude, it's no wonder that a one-trick pony like Rove seems like a genius.

One Beeeelion

Erm, yeah, tip to those in the Bush administration who are chattering about how well the training of the Iraqi army is going:

All the training in the world won't matter when the defence minister hightails it with the money that was supposed to buy weapons.

Well, ok, that's not quite fair. They did get weapons:

The "robbery" is believed to include the signing of multimillion-dollar deals with companies to supply equipment that was sometimes inappropriate for the new army or was years out of date. It is also alleged that the ministry paid huge premiums for some military hardware.

Mr Allawi said the rampant corruption and fraud at the defence ministry had left the new Iraqi army with second-rate weapons with which to confront the insurgency. "Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal," Mr Allawi said.

Guess what the guy's excuse is?

Mr Shaalan, who is understood to be living in Jordan, has denied complicity in the scandal, saying that his actions as defence minister were ultimately the responsibility of the US authorities in Iraq.

This is likely true- the Iraqi government isn't going to say "boo" right now without the US authorities holding up a cue card. Either the US authorities didn't know, or didn't care. "Didn't know" is possible, but "didn't care" is much scarier, because it implies that the authorities know that they aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and that all this "training" is a mirage.

Considering that the people describing Iraq as a "permanent base" haven't exactly gone anywhere except under political cover, it seems that "didn't care" is likelier as well.

Even had Katrina not already ruined its credibility, the Bush administration seems doomed to it in Iraq anyway. Katrina just sped up the timeline.

Flattery?

this ain't me, but it's funny that the concept comes so easily to other people as well.

To be clear, though: Just like these fellows, I have no connection to Orson Scott Card, nor his work. I don't share political beliefs with him, and I'm not running any sort of complex scam. I merely wanted to use a pseudonym that reflected both on the value of pseudonymous debate and on political rhetoric in general.

Besides, Ender's Game was a brilliant book, and the two subsequent series had a lot of bright moments as well, even if the "Shadow" series had Heinlein-esque issues with conservative preachiness.

(This came up wayyyy back when I was having issues with ol' Steven Den Beste, but as the link to my first post that I had on the old site isn't on this one yet, I thought I should make things clear.)

What interests me, though, is that according to the google blogsearch, I'm about the only "Demosthenes" that stays pseudonymous. Not sure why that is.

"Yard Apes"

Wow, you can probably smell the racism going on in the US right now from somewhere in Chile.

A Greenville Technical College official who twice referred to New Orleans evacuees in Greenville as "yard apes" has resigned, school officials said. Renee Holcombe, formerly an associate vice president for student services with a staff of about 40, told employees in two separate briefings last week that the school's aid for the mostly black hurricane victims staying at the Palmetto Expo Center would include sending yellow buses to pick up the "yard apes," said Barton and senior vice president Ben Dillard....

Story's on Crooks and Liars.

On the Bush speech: didn't watch it, been catching the reactions, though, and it looks like he's getting cover from pretty much everybody he's promised money to. Makes sense- they want turkee, and being able to nail the president on his "too little, too late" isn't worth poverty. The question is whether or not the media raises the question of why the hell Karl Rove is running this thing. Unlikely.

Meanwhile, can somebody explain to me why the "we'll nuke them before they nuke us" thing got practically no attention, especially from the big players? A technorati search brings up precious little, and a google blogsearch brings up a number of blogs, but few that are considered the "big blogs", whether conservative or liberal.

People can write about whatever they please, of course, but it is odd.

Talking Pointacide

Yet another one bites the dust: the Congressional Research Office has concluded that Governor Blanco did everything she needed to to get the federal help that didn't come. Admittedly, it also said that the President made the appropriate formal declarations to get the help moving too.

So, once again, we go back to where we started- the unserious attitude towards disaster relief and public service that characterizes the modern Republican party and the Bush presidency.

(Source: Atrios)

Twisting in the wind

Brown is out.

Well, somebody had to get fired. Might as well be him. It's not like Bush is going anywhere.

Still, the core question isn't resolved, and it isn't "how much is Bush responsible" but "how much is Republicanism responsible?"

LDP landslide

Over in Japan, Junichiro Koizumi's LDP has just won a massive victory, one of the biggest in decades of LDP rule. Oddly enough, the leader of one of the most powerful political dynasties in the democratic world won it by being a "rebel", supposedly against the forces trying to stop him from privatizing Japan Post.

(Which is, by the by, not about postal delivery, but about something like 3 trillion dollars in assets- the post office serves as a kind of public bank, and a lot of people in Japan employ it as a safe and conservative investment. While understandable, Japan's predilection for safe and conservative investment is one of the reasons why the country is having problems in the first place.

The key question for me is what this says about foreign policy. This election was not fought on foreign policy, but the enormous win is going to embolden the LDP to seek "normalization" of Japan's foreign policy (read: move away from pacifism), and Koizumi's controversial visits to the Yasukuni war shrine are clearly not ending anytime soon.

While this election may be a good thing for the Japanese economy, I do wonder whether or not it will increase the tensions between Japan and China. Hu Jintao is a pragmatist, so I expect that he'll read the situation correctly and understand that this isn't a full-out endorsement of the controversial normalization process...but not everybody in China is going to see it this way, and they're pretty paranoid about Japanese militarization.

Absolutely Batshit Insane

Impolite, perhaps, but what would you call the Bush administration apparently adopting a policy of PREEMPTIVE NUCLEAR ATTACKS.

A PRESIDENT of the United States would be able to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes against enemies planning to use weapons of mass destruction under a revised “nuclear operations” doctrine to be signed in the next few weeks.

In a significant shift after half a century of nuclear deterrence based on the threat of massive retaliation, the revised doctrine would allow pre-emptive strikes against states or terror groups, and to destroy chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.

Presidential approval would still be required for any nuclear strike, but the updated document, the existence of which was confirmed by the Pentagon at the weekend, emphasises the need for the US to adapt to a world of worsening proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in which deterrence might fail. In that event, it states, “the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary”.

This isn't even pre-emption, because that implies immediacy that doesn't necessarily exist here. This is prevention. This is a doctrine of nuclear annihilation based on the potential of attack.

It's also terrible, TERRIBLE strategic policy. First strike doctrines only really exist for one reason: you have territory that you want to protect so badly that you're willing to use nuclear weapons to protect it from conventional attack, in situations where your conventional power isn't up to snuff.

(Western Europe in the Cold War is the paradigmatic example- the US couldn't defend it conventionally.)

It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with defending against WMD. The core rule of MAD is that you defend against WMD with WMD... that is, nuclear weapons. The reason is simple- you don't want to provoke escalation or preemption yourself. If you say "only defense" and the other guy says "only defense", then neither of you attacks, as long as you're sure that both of you are credible. Both are safe. There exists the possibility that conventional conflict could ramp up to nuclear, but it's supposed to be so vanishingly remote that it would have to take something enormous (like the Soviet Union conquering western Europe) for it to happen, and even then it's a crapshoot as to whether or not it will escalate to nukes.

In this case, we've got Bush saying "we'll nuke you before you can nuke us". That throws the whole logic of MAD to the wind. Saying that will not stop anybody from getting weapons- far from it, they'll be rushing to do so on the off chance that you might nuke them for some other reason that you haven't stated yet- after all, you set the precedent. Once they get them, they'll use them, because they'll have nothing to lose, and the #1 rule in conflict prevention is making sure that nobody EVER ends up in that situation, because I for one don't want to see Tel Aviv, Damascus, Tehran and New York as nothing more than smoking craters of radioactive glass.

And in this case, it could be for something as nebulous as a state unwittingly hosting a terrorist group that a faction in DoD believes may have a cache of Sarin gas.

This is utter lunacy. You couldn't come up with a worse, more dangerous strategy if you tried. Even proposing it is a disaster. Somebody PLEASE tell me that it's a hoax or a distraction from the New Orleans disaster or red meat for Republicans or SOMETHING. Anything to stop those three horrible little words that every thinking human being should be really, really worried about right this fucking SECOND:

What about China?

Blame the National Weather Service?

Ok, the attempts to pass off blame have gone from irritating to evil to, as Capitolbuzz highlights, just plain goofy.

U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is suggesting that early mistakes in predicting the path of Hurricane Katrina may be a symptom of lost focus at the National Weather Service. Santorum, who introduced legislation earlier this year to curb the output of government weather forecasters, says tracking life-threatening weather must be central to what the agency is doing.

Asked about Katrina by WITF, Santorum described weather service warnings for Florida, where the storm first made landfall, as “not sufficient." Santorum’s bill instructs the government to abandon weather prediction and data reporting efforts that duplicate private-sector activity. He came under fire when it was revealed that the head of State College-based AccuWeather, which would benefit, has given his campaigns thousands of dollars.

Honestly. I can actually understand how this argument could be made, had the NWS not done its job... but it did, and everybody knew what was happening. As Atrios reminds us, the warnings were direct and frightening, predicting the fallout of the storm with stunning accuracy.

Face it, Santorum, you've just had your argument utterly rebuked. Give up, tell Accuweather they'll have to try again down the road, and move on.

Open Tip for Matthew Yglesias:

When you say something like "I know you're not supposed to quote Steve Sailer because he writes stuff like this"...

...you stop right there. Go make a sandwich or something. Quoting a racist bastard like Sailer making an obvious point about how the media likes people who do PR well only harms your own reputation in a way that quoting ANSWER or whoever never could.

That's like wading through the comments thread on Lizard Gulpin' Felons and hauling out someone opining "I like cake". Yes, we all like cake, but linking to that fetid hole still doesn't make sense.

Nice Summary

From Garance Franke-Ruta over at tapped:

Think about it. What if Bush had personally gone down to the Superdome last Thursday or Friday and started handing out water himself? Sure, it would have been a P.R. stunt, just like his staged photo-ops with fire-fighters and rescue personnel were. But it would have been an effective stunt, rather than a transparent flop, because it would have demonstrated leadership and resolve. Handled properly, Bush's response to Katrina could have massively shored up Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman's effort to attract black voters to the GOP and helped lift his falling poll ratings. Certainly Bush would have faced the anger of those trapped at the Superdome had he gone there -- an unpredictable situation -- but he could have used his fleet of presidential aircraft to bring in supplies for them to mitigate that, or turned Air Force One into a relief conduit that dropped off supplies before bringing the president in, giving him a grateful and relieved audience. Or he could have worked with the Red Cross to get some kind of private relief effort in place. At such a moment of crisis, who cared what the chain of command was or whose responsibility it was to act? Anyone with the power to mitigate the horror had a personal obligation to do so, and Bush, as commander-in-chief, personally could have done a lot to help people out if he'd wanted to; the nation would have cheered him if he had. Instead, his visits to Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi did little to shore up his support, show leadership, or change facts on the ground.

Bush's obvious detachment has likely torpedoed the GOP effort to attract African-Americans for another generation, led to on-air discussions on major national networks about whether or not he's a racist (talk about P.R. nightmares), damaged his standing as a leader, thrown the press into open revolt, and scandalized the world.

I agree with him that this isn't really effective PR, and certainly not effective use of the symbolic power of the Presidency, but it's clear that all they really want to do is displace blame. I don't think that Rove thinks that he can really make Bush look good, that stupid "pleading" talking point aside... all he can do is obfuscate the blame long enough for the news cycle to end, and do what he can to get the media back on its leash.

In that, he's been slightly successful, but for what purpose? Re-election isn't an issue, and the eyes of history are going to say the same thing that the media was saying last week when it (to mix metaphors) got the bit in its teeth- that Bush could have done something, that he didn't, and that all the spin-doctor nonsense about seperation of powers doesn't make a damned bit of difference.

No matter how hard Rove spins it, the failure in New Orleans will be Bush's most infamous legacy.

At least, I honestly hope it will be.

Hunter Heralds Horseshit

I had been annoyed with Hunter at Dailykos a while back for playing the moderation game; fortunately, there no moderation here , when he tears the living heart out of the new "Bush pleaded for the evacuation" talking point. Not only does he refute it (although it's been refuted enough already), but breaks down how it's even implausible:

Following the lie, however, we see that in order to even argue the point, you have to agree with a whole litany of other points:

* That President Bush himself, as well as presumably his entire team, knew full well that Katrina was a devastating storm requiring mass evacuations in front of it, and one which would wreak catastrophic damage.

* And yet President Bush, and the rest of his cabinet, remained on vacation while they knew that.

* And yet FEMA was utterly unprepared, apparently, to offer assistance for it.

* And yet Homeland Security did, apparently, nothing to ensure FEMA was prepared to offer assistance for it.

* And yet in spite of apparently knowing the danger to New Orleans in specific, both the President and the administrator of FEMA were completely unaware that anyone had "foreseen" that the levees would fail -- and apparently was only monitoring the levee condition via newspaper headlines.

* And yet, in the days following the storm, the FEMA director insisted that he wasn't even aware 15,000 evacuees had fled to the New Orleans convention center, a designated shelter area, until he was told by reporters.

* And yet, FEMA continued to reject assistance and turn rescuers away during the most critical days after the storm.

As Hunter points out, having Bush warn Blanco and the mayor beforehand makes his actions spectacularly worse, not better.

Here's the problem, with all these lies. There's a city gone. And during the period of time when the people of that city needed help most, that help was not there. That's not spinnable. That's simple fact. It's not going to go away.

So let's nail this down, exactly what Bush did know, and when he knew it. If the White House spin is that George W. Bush knew full well what was going on, even more than the local and state officials did, one would think that would predicate that George W. Bush has responsibility for government actions -- or lack of actions -- during these "death hours".

One would think.

One would think.

But many don't.

Disconnection

One useful action that I think needs to take place to sort out everything that's going on is to disconnect the different threads of criticism. Why? Because some critiques don't necessarily have that much to do with one another, and trying to mash them together into some organic whole allows for more effective use of the "shotgun" counterattack that the Bush administration is on about.

After all, if it's one big target, they're bound to hit something.

I'll discuss one example, the "Bush didn't stop his vacation" and "FEMA screwed up badly and delayed too long" critiques. They're related, but don't entirely overlap, and not making the distinction has obscured why the vacation is an issue. While Bush appointed the hapless FEMA execs, there was also the distinct possibility that I highlighted earlier that the "security at all costs" mentality that prompted FEMA to keep aid workers out may have more to do with hand-me-down military culture than anything else.

More importantly, though, it blurs the real reason why Bush needed to stop the vacation and get involved immediately: the symbolic role of the presidency. The president of the United States is essentially an elected constitutional monarch; there are major differences, but the symbolic role (if not the substantive role) is pretty similar. Bush couldn't, and shouldn't, have been personally responsible for coordinating the situation on the ground; that was the job of the people that he hired to do the job, and he hired them long before this vacation started. Instead, he should have cut his vacation short prior to the hurricane and done what he actually *could* to help in order to exploit that symbolic role to help remind the people of the United States and especially the people in the hurricane-afflicted areas that he does care about them, that the situation does bother him, and that through him they have the attention and sympathy of the United States of America as a whole.

It's kind of like why the Royal Family was picking through the rubble of London during the Blitz- it's symbolic, and symbols are important.

It's the symbolic element of what Bush did that outraged everybody. He showed that he didn't care. Repeatedly. Every public appearance, every stupid quip, every strummed guitar- he showed that he thought that the survivors were beneath his notice, like the kind of kings that the Americans rebelled against in the first place.

No matter what he does now, that damage is done. The political veil has been dropped over the symbolic role of the presidency, and any effort he makes now will just be seen as a political gesture, even were it genuine. That sense of unimportance will linger in the minds of all Americans, even those who defend the president's substantial actions.

He didn't care about New Orleans, so why should he care about them?

"Bus 'em" Responses

Pursuant to the bus issue: this Kos Diary destroys the "why didn't Nagant send people away on the school buses" argument.

The response is pretty simple:

1) "Compelled evacuation is unprecedented, unlikely to succeed, and unconstitutional, and therefore is probably not allowed, even in a state of emergency." (thus, those who wouldn't go, wouldn't go, but still need to be dealt with as much as possible.)

2) "There is no more dangerous place for evacuees during a hurricane than being trapped in a vehicle on an interstate." (If the hurricane had sped up or the buses had been caught in gridlock, those people would be dead, guaranteed.)

and

3) the mayor did plan, and DHS had to sign off on it: "In fact, he took emergency action, ordered evacuation, provided transportation, and otherwise helped 80% of his citizens evacuate. Although, as I diaried earlier, the State does have responsibility for designing emergency evacuation and response plans to natural disasters, when those disasters overwhelm local and state resources or when they are "incidents of national significance," which the breaches of the levees surely were (if not the threat of a Cat 5 hurricane itself), then the primary responsibility is upon FEMA and DHS to coordinate the response. Regardless, FEMA and DHS still have to approve of any state and local plans, not rubber-stamp them."

On this last one, stop and think about it. Who has the resources to properly vet and coordinate a plan like this? A mayor's office of a notoriously poverty-stricken city certainly doesn't. The state might, and certainly has a role in developing it, but they can't plan on using resources that they don't have.

Only the DHS had the ability to truly verify that a) the plan is workable (they should have experts on this, considering the likelihood of the hurricane) and b) that they can and will commit the resources. The state's plan (as Greuben's diary pointed out) was to do what they could while they waited for FEMA. The whole plan was predicated on FEMA's timely arrival.

The arrival wasn't timely.

THAT'S WHY PEOPLE ARE ANGRY.

If the plan wasn't workable, it was DHS's job to say "wait up... if the highways are damaged, we will have difficulty getting in, you might need to rethink this plan" or "we will need martial law declared in case of looting" or whatever else they thought they needed. If they mistook or underestimated what was required, that isn't the fault of the mayor and governor. How could either know what resources the DHS had at its disposal as well as DHS?

Vetting a plan makes you responsible for it as much as the person who designed it. If DHS vetted the plan, they have responsibility for it.

Period.

Post on Disaster and the Political Response

Via Swopa on needlenose (and a chain of other bloggers) comes this decent piece by Dan Froomkin about the political response to the outraged criticism of the Bush administration.

It's pretty much what we all expected, and what Steyn exemplified below- blame everybody but Bush, and haul out any and all arguments that can be deployed to serve that goal, no matter how silly, in the hope that one will stick.

(That's about the only reason for the ridiculous "school bus" attack on Nagin... there were neither enough buses nor enough drivers to get anywhere near enough people out for it to matter, but it LOOKS bad.)

Funny thing? The media really does seem too ticked off to care. They've figured out, rightly enough, that any failures of the state and city officials doesn't excuse FEMA's poor response, and the whole "we can't get people in" excuse is countered not only by the horde of reporters there, but also the simple fact that the storm's effects were predictable, and FEMA's inability to manage worst-case scenarios (which this wasn't) can not be used to excuse said inability.

(The logistics were tough? Too bad, hurricanes do that.)

The hail of bullshit we're all getting drenched with from Rove and his online tools and hangers-on isn't going to get the Bushies out of this one. When even the SCLM is just wiping it away and continuing to ask unfortunate questions, the "blogosphere" isn't gonna do shit.

(Yes, I've had my fill of blog triumphalism, but that's a story for another day.)

Edit: Judging by what I'm seeing in the comments of this Kos entry, I may have spoken too soon, because it looks like the media is starting to push the "blame the mayor, blame the governor" claims.

Let's make no mistake about this. If the Bush administration walks away clean from this, there is no hope for the Union, because I cannot think of any worse situation being more poorly handled by the federal government than this.

Can Somebody Punch Mark Steyn?

Blaming everybody but the president deserves some sort of response.

Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome, New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday...

Oh, right, the school buses.

Never mind that 16,830 people is just slightly less than the OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND who were forced to remain, never mind that you'd need to find people to drive all those buses at a moment's notice, never mind the people that couldn't move due to health issues, never mind that the Mayor had no authority to dump thousands of people on, say, Houston, never mind that the plan already existed to move people into the Superdome and Convention Centre before the hurricane started and that the Mayor enacted that plan, never mind that the whole point of the Superdome/Convention Centre plan was that FEMA was going to come in and help those people, never mind that FEMA was blocking people from letting people in...

..it's all the Mayor's fault.

On 9/11, the federal government failed the people; last week, local and state government failed the people. On 9/11, they stuck to the 30-year-old plan; last week, they didn't bother implementing the state-of-the-art 21st-century plan. Why argue about which level of bureaucracy you prefer to be let down by?

My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."

Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would.

"Self-reliance"? What the hell were these people supposed to do, Mark? Aside from the underwater bus BS, what the hell does this have to do with anything? What exactly were they supposed to do? Eat each other? Swim through the horrible oil-and-sewage ridden water? Fight their way past the FEMA barricades that were PREVENTING THEM FROM LEAVING THE CITY?

Die in an orderly fashion?

Most of the looting happened because people wanted to survive, you tendentious steaming faecal mound. The looters were the self-reliant ones- they realized that their government, their FEDERAL government, had failed them and took matters into their own hands. Whether or not somebody took a TV from Wal-Mart is absolutely immaterial; the focus on it says more about the Steyn and the other critics than the victims.

As for the "let's roll" crap... that's beneath contempt. It has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber noted the "let them eat cake" element of Steyn's piece, but it's worse than that. It's a transparent attempt to foist the blame on anybody but Steyn's beloved Bush, to blame the victims, and (bizarrely and shockingly) try to leverage the tragedy of 9/11 to try to distract from the tragedy here.

I really, really hope we can get Steyn, Anderson Cooper, Geraldo and maybe Olbermann on the same panel. Let's see how "self-sufficient" the bastard is when he's being ripped into meaty chunks.