Bush Blows KatrinaFollowing the media trail of Dubya's disaster: Doesn't anyone at the White House read National Geographic?by Chuck Taylor
President Bush had that
My Pet Goat look last Friday, Sept. 2, as he was briefed in an airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala. The clenched jaw, the grimace, the thousand-mile stare. Was this the expression of a man who was about to finally take charge, or a man in over his head? He stood before the cameras while the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, who just four years ago was essentially fired from his post as the judges-and-stewards commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, described to the commander in chief in alarmingly simple terms the disaster that covered the map spread before them. This was for show. The president already knew exactly how bad it was. Which made it an incredibly stupid photo op, an unintentional symbol of his weeklong failure. If you took this event at face value, the president of the United States ostensibly was just then getting up to speed on the unprecedented devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which had swept through five days earlier.
Beside Bush and Brown were Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, two governors, and U.S. Coast Guard officials. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, a former Republican U.S. representative, praised the federal response, apparently having watched only Fox News, where commentary and coverage in the early going were deferential to the official version of reality. Then the governors and Bush praised the Coast Guard—getting that right, at least. By actually saving lives with a fleet of 43 orange helicopters flown in from around the country—some 11,000 people have been rescued by air—the Coast Guard was the only non–local government entity that seemed to be actually doing anything before National Guard troops and supplies poured into New Orleans later that Friday, just in time for the president's visit. Time writer Nancy Gibbs this week nailed it: "Somehow Harry Connick Jr. could get to the New Orleans Convention Center and offer help, but not the National Guard."
Today we're the only developed nation with refugee camps—there's really no other term for them—and there's going to be hell to pay. For those of us who have always regarded George W. Bush as an incurious lightweight who has never lost sleep or had a real job, the president's inaction last week was tragic but not surprising. For everyone else but the most delusional Republicans, one hopes Katrina will be a watershed of realization in the months ahead if not immediately. Hundreds of stories will continue to emerge—of heroism in the absence of government, of suffering, of heartbreak. Hundreds of thousands of people without homes or jobs will look elsewhere for a future, touching every state somehow. The count of bodies will rise as quickly as the price of gas, and neither closely watched statistic will encourage people to spend money this fall. Noted Slate business writer Daniel Gross: "Economically speaking, Katrina is no 9/11. It may be much worse." There will also be a 9/11 Commission–caliber investigation, although, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote, if 9/11 is any guide, full disclosure will come only "after the administration and its apologists erect every possible barrier to keep us from learning the truth."
The Katrina aftermath might have been the best-covered disaster in history. But so far, no journalist has been able to satisfactorily answer what everyone wants to know: How could the response have been so botched? No disaster is more predictable than a hurricane, and this one was anticipated years ago. How can you screw up a tropical storm relief effort in the age of satellites, after all the lessons we've learned from dozens of previous storms? If you review what experts have been saying about Louisiana for years and what they predicted the weekend before the storm hit, and if you think back at what obviously needed to be done in the aftermath based on what we all saw on television, and when you consider that numerous journalists were getting downright combative with government officials as those officials insisted on remaining clueless, it's hard to understand how the president, that Friday in Mobile, could have said to the FEMA chief: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Just two hours earlier at the White House, as he was about to head for the Gulf Coast, Bush had conceded to reporters, finally, that the government's response to Katrina was not acceptable. In Bush's brain, which assessment was true?
The contradiction was emblematic. Said Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline the day before the president's tour of the devastation: "To hear federal and local officials describing what is happening on the ground in New Orleans is to know that one group or the other is seriously out of touch or incapable of confronting the truth."
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