Say Anything Blog

How do you create a political scandal out of a natural disaster? A hunting accident? A business transaction of a sort that ordinarily goes unnoticed? The national press corps has figured out a way: Take a standard that is relative, such as timeliness, and allege that in each case, President Bush failed to meet the standard.

Let's take the first example — Bush's "late" response to Hurricane Katrina. As we now know, the disastrous aftermath of the storm occurred primarily for three reasons:

1. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco failed to create an adequate evacuation plan for the city, and many people were left behind after the storm.

2. A levee collapsed because the government contractor that built it during the 1990s made a fatal error and did not sink the concrete walls deep enough into the ground.

3. FEMA was not prepared to handle the resulting devastation because its director, Michael Brown, had spent the previous years fighting debilitating turf battles after its absorption into the Department of Homeland Security, rather than strengthening its ability to respond to natural disasters.

So the governor and the mayor failed to evacuate the city, a flawed levee built before Bush became president collapsed and problems endemic to FEMA had rendered it ineffective in responding to the disaster. There is nothing Bush could have done at the time to rectify any of these problems. Nevertheless, his critics in the press repeated over and over that the root of the problem was Bush's "late" response to the storm. Of course, these same critics also argued that his arrival on the scene days later was nothing more than a distraction and a photo-op — charges they would doubtlessly have made had he flown in much earlier.