In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough political style, the administration is . . . working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.
"The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials," Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials."
That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.
As I was watching that Hannity Asshole trying to do the Karl Rove Goose-step, it struck me that FOX may finally be paying a price for its total devotion to All Things Bush. FoxNews continues to support that idiot in the White House even though other conservative news sources have been very critical of his performance. As Bob Herbert wrote yesterday: "The chorus of criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this administration."
Herbert has hit upon why Karl Rove's "re-focus the blame" strategy won't work. It is one thing for Rove to get a bunch of Bush supporters to lie about the circumstances surrounding the medals John Kerry received during the Viet Nam War. Those events happened over three decades ago, and no cameras were there to record them. Although Kerry paraded as many eye witnesses as he could in front of the cameras to dispel the lies, Rove's version was still out there for anyone willing to buy into it. It is a bit more difficult, however, to re-write history when everyone in the country was watching the events unfold on television right before their eyes less than a week ago.
And speaking of television, someone at CNN has apparently decided to use this opportunity to step out of its Fox-lite mode and do some real reporting. I haven't been able to watch CNN around the clock, but I've been impressed with the coverage I've seen so far. It is clear to me that the folks running the show over there sent out a memo informing their people to take the gloves off and start reporting the obvious, namely, that our president failed miserably in his response to Katrina and lots of people died as a result of his incompetence.
Unfortunately, not all of the news outlets have come to their senses regarding the threat BushCo currently presents to the safety and security of this nation. Some are even willing to report an obvious lie as truth. As Josh Marshall noted, the Washington Post and Newsweek both reported as fact that Governor Blanco of Louisiana failed to declare a state of emergency. A "senior Bush official" was named as the source for that little piece of information, and it turned out to be a complete fabrication (Blanco declared a state of emergency on August 26).
There is, however, one guy at MSNBC who will not be bamboozled by any more Bush Regime lies, and that is Keith Olbermann. I wasn't able to watch him deliver his op/ed piece last night, but the text of his remarks are here, and he had a few things to say, including this:
For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — "New Orleans."
The video of his remarks can be found here, and it is pretty hard to argue with what he has to say.
Herbert Hoover will always be negatively associated with the Great Depression. I have long thought that history would define Bush's presidency in terms of his failure in Iraq, because I didn't think he and his associates would be able to top that level of incompetence.
Man, was I wrong. Now all we can do is hope that "New Orleans" will indeed be the two words that historians will use to define our current government, and not some other words describing yet another Bush-spawned ultra-catastrophe waiting for us around the corner.
UPDATE: Jack Cafferty was just reading some e-mails on CNN. One of the e-mailers wrote: "Bush heading the investigation on what went wrong last week would be like Ken Lay investigating what went wrong with Enron."
There are some pretty pissed off people out there.
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