MSNBC - How Bush Blew It

Newsweek - How Bush Blew it (on Katrina)
Rumsfeld said don't send in the army
Rove is in Charge

Check out last week's Newsweek before it's unavailable. Here's why George W. was clueless regarding the Hurricane Katrina's potential for catastrophe:


The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

So once George sees the video - he convenes his cabinet and Donald Rumsfeld talks him out of sending in the troops. [Shouldn't this guy have been fired for that little mistake in Iraq?]

Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.



MSNBC - How Bush Blew It


Later in the week it came out that Carl Rove is in charge of the Katrina response in the White House. I suppose that it's appropriate that "Bush's Brain" does the thinking from this point on. In his big speech, the President announced that they would build up New Orleans like the Six Million (Make that 100 Billion) Dollar Man, better than it was, bigger stronger, faster. No mention of the fact that the ground is sinking, and the ocean is eating away at Southern Louisiana at a fairly rapid rate. For this, the President is getting justifiable criticism from the right and the left.

I am shocked to find that I agree with the sentiments of George Will, expressed on ABC's This Week program on Sunday. I couldn't find his quote, but essentially he said that The evacuation of New Orleans has already occurred, it is proper that many of the people that left New Orleans (and the gulf coast) resettle elsewhere. It is foolish to create subsidies to get them to return. He said (and I agree) that there is no entitlement to live in New Orleans.