A tsunami of compassion:
The Bush White House is busy rebuilding: its poll numbers that is. Seems, people down in that part of the world are still a little pissed off at him, so he went back to the scene of the crime again yesterday. Apparently, his first trip, where he explained he was working hard, progress was being made, Trent Lott was going to get a great new house and he had little too much fun in New Orleans in the past, didn’t really go over well. This time, he showed up at a shelter run by a religious group in Baton Rouge with T.D. Jakes, (Look everybody, I’m with a brown one!) and praised all the private (i.e. religious) organizations helping out. (Isn’t there some way to get taxpayer money to all these groups? Ask FEMA)

He’d better work harder because I briefly saw Lou Dobbs on CNN last night and he cited a new ABC News/Washington Post poll that said 47% of Americans disapproved of his handling of the situation in New Orleans and 46% didn’t. Out of that Dobbs somehow came to the conclusion that the American people didn’t blame Bush for the Katrina disaster at all. As long as those that support Bush are still on board, that’s all that matters, I guess. Might as well just say 100% don’t blame Bush. The other half of America, the “Bush haters,” are liberals with an agenda, they don’t count.

Yes, the administration is in full ‘image resuscitation mode;’ this weekend Rummy was down in the disaster zone to observe the people of New Orleans discovering the untidiness of their own freedom, from all of their possessions. Also, Condi Rice, of all people, got dragged away from her vacation and was put on to a flight down to Alabama to be with “her people,” you know, black people.

Remember, Condi is black, so that means the slow response to hundreds of thousands of poor black victims waiting for days in squalid circumstances while Bush fiddled had nothing to do with race. If people in Palm Beach or Gross Point, Mich. had been in a similar position, they’d have to wait almost a week too. Stop playing the “race card.” (The fact that gun sales are up a zillion percent in Baton Rouge has nothing to do with race either.)

Bush to investigate.

Today, Dubya says he’s personally going to lead the investigation into the federal response to the Katrina disaster. (Or lack of it. Isn’t that sort of like having Lynndie England lead the investigation of Abu Ghraib?) He’s sending Cheney, fresh off his duck hunting vacation in Wyoming, down to the Gulf Coast to bang heads together. (No doubt, with some very lucrative no bid contracts for Haliburton in hand as well.) Treasury secretary John Snow says rebuilding is good for the economy, by the way. We might want to think about leveling Detroit to really get the economy going.

Unfortunately for Bush and Co., the horrific scenes at the convention center, now seared into the public’s psyche, aren’t going away anytime soon. While Michael Brown was busy defending his agency for not knowing about 25,000 people being stranded at the center without food or water three days after the hurricane struck, David Brooks, one of Bush’s most rabid spin-doctors, was reacting to the news by calling the slow reaction of the administration unconscionable.

Last Friday on “Washington Week,” he said leaving the poor to suffer like that was the moral equivalent of leaving wounded on the battlefield. Eventually, I’m sure, Brooks will regain his equilibrium and get back to his shameless flaking for the administration, but his reaction , might be emblematic of a larger unease that even Dubya’s supporters are starting to feel about his administration’s ineptitude in matters of national security. (Even William Kristol said, "Almost every Republican I have spoken with is disappointed" in Bush's performance. [WaPo])

FEMA: another government agency wasting our hard earned money.

Obviously, it’s great to see the Super Dome and the convention center finally being evacuated and it’s about time the military has restored order, more or less, to the city, but it’s the military doing it, not FEMA. Remember FEMA? The administration’s view of the little agency that couldn’t has been from the beginning that of an “oversized entitlement program,” this according to former director Joe Allbaugh, W.’s old time friend and former campaign manager. (‘Why are all these people asking the federal government for hand outs? It’s your fault you stayed in the danger zone, pull yourself up by your bootstraps!’ ) Mississippi congressman Bennie Thompson on the Homeland Security Committee says FEMA is basically a “political resting place for favors” owed. [NYT]

After all, what does someone whose previous job was running the National Arabian Horse Association know about disaster relief? Nothing: he’s a political crony of Joe Allbaugh’s, which is all the qualification he needs. L. Paul Bremer was a favorite of Henry Kissinger, so he got to run Iraq. (And what a job he did!) There’s a reason New Orleans and Baghdad look like carbon copies of each other.

Get the government off our backs!

Why should the federal government have to deal with disasters at all, right? (Ask John Roberts where it says that in the constitution.) Once the estate tax is killed (Let Paris Hilton have her daddy’s money when he dies, she deserves it!) and the tax cuts are made permanent, this whole argument will be merely academic; unlike the now mainstream libertarian theories that are being daily applied to the real world. Let the states worry about it. Private donations will solve the problem. If Exxon/Mobil wants flood control for New Orleans, they’ll pay for it. If a plane crashes because there’s no government regulation of airline safety, people will see it’s an unsafe airline and it’ll eventually go out of business. The markets will decide who lives and who dies.

The buck stops somewhere else.

Ok, so Bush isn’t entirely to blame for this awful mess on the Gulf Coast, many administrations before this one dropped the ball on flood control, but he is the guy in charge now, and back in the old days at least, the buck stopped at the president’s desk. Of course, one of the hallmarks of this presidency is the total lack of any accountability for anything; it’s always some one else’s fault.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the 100,000 or so “refugees” of Katrina in a year or two. (There are still almost 8000 victims of the four hurricanes that went over Florida last year still living in government trailers.) How W. and Co. eventually winds up dealing with rebuilding the lives of these people and their city will be all on him, there won’t be anyone else to blame.


Iraq:

Oh yeah, and then there’s Iraq. He is totally to blame for that. 1,893 US troops have now died in Iraq.

Kofi Annan has said, "One used to be worried about Afghanistan being the center of terrorist activities. My sense is that Iraq has become a major problem and in fact is worse than Afghanistan." [NYT]

And the WaPo reports that while the US is bombing the crap out of Tal Afar "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq group took open control yesterday of a key western town at the Syrian border, deploying its guerrilla fighters in the streets and flying Zarqawi's black banner from rooftops, according to witnesses, residents and others in the city and surrounding villages...A U.S. Marine spokesman, Capt. Jeffrey Pool, said that Marines had no word of any unusual activity in Qaim but that it was possible insurgents were acting in areas out of Americans' sight." Maybe he ought to work for Michael Brown.