Decision ‘08

Will MoDo Rise Above Partisan Cheap Shots?

What are you smoking? Of course not:

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn’t dry. Bye, bye, American lives.

Oh, that’s real cute Maureen, you could have used your position as one of the most read columnists in the nation to contribute in some positive way, but instead you decided to engage in a little fun with song lyrics.

…[I]t is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Please…complete, utter garbage. Maureen could have written of the tremendous outpouring of relief, or even offered substantial criticisms and suggestions for a better tomorrow, but instead, she insults your intelligence by claiming that the President and his advisors just don’t care about Americans in the midst of a tragedy, particularly black Americans.

Nonsense…Dowd is truly despicable…and just you wait, because Frank Rich is still to come…

17 Responses to “Will MoDo Rise Above Partisan Cheap Shots?”

1 The Strata-Sphere Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 9:17 am
Politics of Katrina: Defend The Rescuers

As every can tell here, and across the net, the politics of Katrina has erupted on the left and in the media-formaly-known-as-mainstream. Captain Ed Morrissey has probably done the right thing, he is focusing on helping an has a ban on the discussion…
2 AcademicElephant Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 9:24 am
I’m breaking my Dowd Vow of Silence to note that like Michael Moore, she’s lucky it’s a free country.

And now, secure in the knowledge that I have personally contributed to the gulf coast recovery and encouraged others to do so–and so completely untouched by the “shame” MoDo thinks I should be feeling as someone in rock-solid accord with this administration’s foreign AND domestic policy, I’m going to go for a nice long run and she can just call me a “callous,” “psychopathic,” fitness-crazed, exercise-nut of a Bushie. It would be an honor.
3 Mark Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 9:31 am
Enjoy your run, you psychopathic excercise-nut, you…
4 peter Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 11:42 am
Well, I don’t want to endorse Maureen Dowd’s assertion that Bush is indifferent to poor blacks, because I think the more important issue is what the Bush administration’s actions were rather than what its intentions were. However, when you strip away the bluster, she makes several valid points which ought to be addressed.

Wth leadership comes accountability, and the Bush administration has to be held accountable for its actions. What were those actions? Cutting the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers for coastal work from a requested $105 million to $40 million. Naming a political hack to head FEMA. Diverting resources to Iraq. Lack of communication and intelligence (Brown didn’t know until Thursday that there were over 10,000 people in the Superdome? Anybody who watched television knew that…). Not taking the possibility of a flood seriously (Bush thought “nobody expected” that this could happen?). A dilatory response to something which was widely and urgently predicted two days before the event.

Actions have consequences. When you cut funding for infrastructure and then the infrastructure fails, it is your fault. No amount of partisanship can obscure that. If you appoint someone to run FEMA with no background in emergency management, then you are responsible if FEMA’s response is inadequate. It’s that simple. And so forth.

I’m reluctant to pile onto Bush, if only because everyone else is. However, it has been his watch for five years, and among the most important things he should be judged on is how his administration responded when faced with an emergency. Natural disasters are inevitable — every administration should be judged on how it anticipates, prepares for, and responds to them. Based on any conceivable standard, this administration performed miserably on all counts. I don’t have any issue with complaining about Maureen Dowd’s tone (although the Don McLean thing — hey, the song always reminds me of driving around in my Dad’s 67 Cougar on hot summer nights). The issue is not her tone — rather, the issue is how to reverse course to the way things were before Bush, when the infrastructure received adequate funding and attention and government response was not lumbering and ineffective.
5 Mark Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 12:55 pm
Well, see, you lost me there at the end…the way things were before Bush? Come on, now, peter - if the infrastructure had recieved adequate funding and attention, that levee would have probably been more robust, don’t you think? And to say that government response before Bush was not lumbering and ineffective….you know better than that!

I’m not trying to absolve Bush of all blame; clearly the bucks stops with the President. But let’s not pretend that pre-Bush we lived in a wonderful land of chocolate cars and highways made of gold…
6 peter Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 2:19 pm
No, certainly the government does not function like a well-oiled machine, and disasters are messy. Still, when I think of previous catastrophes — Camille, Andrew, the Northridge earthquake, Loma Prieta, flooding in the midwest, drought — it seems to my partisan eyes that things went much better then.

However, there are two other things which separate Katrina from previous disasters. First, Bush ran on an explicit platform of shrinking government. If you reduce spending, you are responsible for the inevitable consequences of a government with fewer resources. Had he left things alone, he would bear less blame — but he should be held accountable for the results of his philosophy.

Second, nobody would accuse George Bush of staying up too many nights to master the intracacies of how the government works and what it can do. Say what you will about Bill Clinton — call him a policy wonk — but he had a thorough understanding not only of government, but about the nuts and bolts issues surrounding disaster relief, infrastructure, etc. I think it is reasonable to believe that if Katrina had occured under Clinton’s watch, you would have seen him on the scene immediately and resources would have been mobilized much more quickly. Competence is an essential criterion to evaluate any administration, and in this instance (a cheap shot: and so many others) George Bush fails the test.
7 AcademicElephant Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Peter, I don’t want to ruin Mark’s fun, but I have a couple of thoughts:

Point one: Things went better after those catastrophes because they were not of the magnitude of Katrina. It is easier to step over a three foot bar than to vault over a seven foot one.

Point two: I do not think it can be assumed that Clinton would have responded more effectively becasue there’s no track record. The worst thing he had to contend with was his own impeachment, certainly nothing on the scale of a 9/11 or a Katrina.

Finally, it’s only natural that we would disagree on the policy of the response, but I think vague charges of incompetence based on vague assertions of Clinton’s “wonk”-ness are indeed cheap. Say what you will about the crew in this administration, they know their way around the federal government.
8 peter Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 2:55 pm
Point one: perhaps. Being a Bay Area resident, I can tell you that Loma Prieta was way up there as far as catastrophes go. Maybe Katrina was of such a huge scale that it was sui generis. However, the response was not only inadequate to Katrina — it would have been inadequate even for a less catastrophic event. For two or three days, nothing happened. Communication was so bad that the FEMA head was unaware of the people in the convention center. There was a two day warning before the event — yet the reaction was too little and too late. Maybe nothing the government could have done would have solved all of the problems. However, the government certainly could have done much more to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to Katrina than it did.

Point two: well, we are dealing with hypotheticals here, so who knows.

Point three: if so, then do the results speak for themselves?
9 Clint Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 3:58 pm
Peter-

“For two or three days, nothing happened.”

In terms of the Federal response, that’s just not a reasonable description of what happened — though I can understand if you’re watching CNN why you might think that it is.

For example, here is the D.O.D. briefing from Wednesday on what they’d already done, were doing, and were planning on doing at that point. Highlight: 7,200 military and 11,000 national guard on location (about half in Louisiana and half in Mississippi, with some in Alabama and Florida), a number that was to double over the next day or two. But, seriously, read the whole thing. Most of what they were doing in the days before the hurricane and immediately after was setting up the infrastructure to provide the needed aid.

Perhaps we should have a system in place whereby the Federal government can react even more massively and rapidly to such a disaster. Perhaps the Pentagon should receive 911 calls and manage all firefighting efforts and domestic disturbance calls from their situation room. That’s not the system we have, it’s not the system we’ve had under Democratic presidents, and it’s not a system anyone has seriously proposed before.
10 peter Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 5:01 pm
Perhaps saying that the government did nothing is an exaggeration, but what was done was clearly inadequate to the task. I tell the people who work for me that they get judged on results, not on effort. It’s easy enough to pile on Bush because of what has happened in the past week — the point I am trying to make is that these results are an inevitable consequence of his governing philosophy.

Why? Well, as noted above, shrinking government will lead to diminished resources. More importantly, perhaps, a President can only achieve so much in four or eight years, and an administration can fairly be judged on what it thinks is important. Much of Bush’s Presidency has been absorbed by the wars in Iraq and Afganistan — I would argue that this was part of the reason why the government could not handle Katrina, but I respect (though disagree with) the argument that 9/11 and the war on terror necessitated an aggressive foreign policy.

However, on domestic policy, Bush could have focussed on the boring but essential tasks of government, which certainly includes infrastructure maintenance and preparation for disaster relief. It’s a cheap shot to say that if Bush spent less time trying to stop gay marriage, impede stem cell research, and dismantle Social Security, then the government would have been better able to respond to Katrina. However, I think there is some truth there — by making ideological issues the centerpiece of his domestic policty, he did not make coastal protection a priority and hence it suffered (along with the electrical grid, water supplies in the West, etc.) Trying to cut the budget for coastal protection (as Bodman did in July) is one part of the problem — the larger issue is the attention paid to “wedge issues” which are appealing to his base but have little to do what the government should really be doing.

I think it was Bill Purcells who said that you are what your record is. In other words: don’t complain about bad umpire calls, poor luck, or anything else — you are no better and no worse than your won-loss record. I think the reason that Bush II gets much more vitriol from the left than Bush I or Reagan is that we really think that he is off the charts bad. (The suggestions by Karl Rove and others that we are unpatriotic because we feel differently doesn’t help). The response to Katrina is emblematic of an administration which we feel is much more concerned with things which are at best peripheral to what government should do (e.g., the wedge issues) than with stick-to-your-knitting things like providing adequate funding for the Army Corps of Engineers.

My own opinion is that this summer has seen the tipping point for George Bush — it’s game over now. The events of this week, combined with the majority opinion that the war in Iraq was misguided, have left him in a hole from which he will not recover. I’m not joyous about having an impotent President — I remember Carter in 1978 and 1979 — but (in my opinion) the less George Bush can do, the less he can do wrong. Maybe there is a silver lining in all of this.
11 Mark Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 6:03 pm
peter, obviously I disagree (see my most recent post ), but I’ll only respond to one thing now - government has grown (considerably) under George W. Bush. Well, okay, two things…Katrina would have happened no matter what happened with the coastal protection cuts everyone keeps pointing too: I ask you, do you seriously think this catastrophe would have been avoided if the cuts hadn’t been made?

You guys are getting a little too excited about this, politically…watch out, it may just backfire…
12 peter Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Certainly, the storm would have hit New Orleans regardless of who is in power in Washington or what they did. If your question is would the levees have held together if there were no coastal protection cuts — then my answer would be: I’m not a civil engineer and I can’t tell you what had to be done to secure the levees. However, when the budget request was cut by 60%, then I think there is a prima facie case that not enough was done.

If your question is would the catastrophe have been avoided if there were more advance planning, more troops and equipment evailable, better communication, or better hands at the wheel, then my answer would be: not avoided but certainly ameliorated. For example, I think it is also a prima facie case that if you let a political appointee run FEMA, rather than someone with experience in emergency management, you will get a much less effective operation. It is hard to quantify what the difference would have been, but giving the reins to someone who has to learn on the job is a reckless thing which is bound to have bad results. Would any company hire a division head with no experience or knowledge of the industry?

I can’t speak for others, but I’m certainly not excited about this — Katrina is a tragedy of enormous proportions, and the fact that government ineptitude exacerbated the pain is not a pleasant thing. Whether it backfires or not: I doubt it, but who knows — I call them as I see them. I have nothing against Republicans: I didn’t vote for Governor Arnold, but I think he is doing a damn fine job (and would vote for him if he runs again). I also have nothing but admiration for people from the right like Scalia, Bob Dole, Margeret Thatcher, and maybe even Orrin (Orren?) Hatch. I don’t agree with them on much, but I respect their intellect and their principles. Even George Bush Sr. wasn’t that bad. It’s just this guy — I think he has brought dishonor to this country in many ways, and I believe that it will take a generation to fix everything that he has done wrong.
13 AcademicElephant Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Peter: What never ceases to amaze me–and perhaps this is the root of the successful two-party system–is how two reasonable people can look at the same words and interpret them completely differently. You write “do the results speak for themselves” and I would respond “absolutely” (which you might as well) and we would mean the opposite things. It is my contention that the administration has been remarkably results-oriented in a remarkably difficult time and that we will look back on this 50 years hence and thank our lucky stars they were where they were when they were. I guess we will have to wait and see.
14 Mark Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:22 pm
peter, I echo what AcademicElephant says; clearly, you are a reasonable person and a valuable contributor to the debate here. I won’t belabor our disagreements, however fundamental some of them may be. One small point before I yield the floor; for the record, I think the biggest single lesson to be learned from this is that disaster planning for large cities requires an effective method of evacuating, for lack of a better word, the underclass; clearly, many, many hundreds or thousands of people died who should never have been in the city to begin with.
15 peter Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:31 pm
Agreed — instant analysis is usually wrong and I may also be wrong. (When Chiang Kai Shek was asked in 1950 what he thought of the French Revolution, he famously responded that “it’s too early to know”). Hopefully we will learn from Katrina and be better equipped the next time disaster strikes –
16 Clint Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
Mark:
“I think the biggest single lesson to be learned from this is that disaster planning for large cities requires an effective method of evacuating, for lack of a better word, the underclass.”

The jaw-dropping problem, for which heads will have to roll, is that they DID have such a plan.

The Mayor just didn’t implement it.
17 Mark Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Clint, all those pictures of school buses that were available don’t paint a pretty picture….