Adding Insult to Injury

I've been away for several days, in a beautiful, extremely sunny place far away from communications and "the media." After easing back into the mainstream last night, when I heard a report on the car radio that the Chief Justice had died, I've spent this morning in a leisurely review of the news.

I am overjoyed that it seems like the folks in the Gulf have finally started getting competent assistance. I heard that the 'black holes' of the New Orleans Convention Center and Superdome have been handled, and it sounds like some of the activities I was talking about in my post early Thursday morning have started up. It's too little, too late for many, but it's a start.

I also see that across the news media, one of the big stories is the question of why there was such an inadequate response from the government, and the clamor of criticism has grown, across the board. While I was away, the White House started to respond to such criticism, and that group effort is worthy of some criticism of its own.

My guess is that, sometime toward the end of the week, Karl Rove must have gotten back from vacation. Over the weekend, it was possible to see various memes percolating through administration statements, signs that the administration was back on its game: shape the media spin through words, not deeds. Sadly for them, this disaster is happening in a place where they can't filter the media feeds, it's easy for reporters to find out the actual truth on the ground, and the editors have learned a few lessons about trusting the adminstration's story.

Two memes are being tried to distract the public and pass the buck. First was what I call the "It was a surprise! Who expected TWO disasters at once?" meme. The implications are that a)they aren't incompetent because no one could have predicted it would be so bad, and b)the response is really big, but because there were TWO disasters, it just looks small. DHS Secretary Chertoff took this one out for a spin Saturday. CNN.com ran a pithy article ripping it to shreds.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years. ...

But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings.

"This is really one which I think was breathtaking in its surprise," Chertoff said. "There has been, over the last few years, some specific planning for the possibility of a significant hurricane in New Orleans with a lot of rainfall, with water rising in the levees and water overflowing the levees," he told reporters Saturday.

That alone would be "a very catastrophic scenario," Chertoff said. "And although the planning was not complete, a lot of work had been done. But there were two problems here. First of all, it's as if someone took that plan and dropped an atomic bomb simply to make it more difficult. We didn't merely have the overflow, we actually had the break in the wall. And I will tell you that, really, that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."

Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans.

"It wasn't until comparatively late, shortly before -- a day, maybe a day and a half, before landfall -- that it became clear that this was going to be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane headed for the New Orleans area."

As far back as Friday, August 26, the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm could be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. Still, storms do change paths, so the possibility existed that it might not hit the city.

But the National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect.

Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29.

(I think Chertoff himself invented that fillip about short warning time. I haven't seen it from any of the other excuseniks they've been parading. Give him credit for creativity, if not honesty or competence.)

Not only are these claims untrue, but they are even absurd if they were true. He's the head of Homeland Security, and he's using surprise as the reason we didn't respond promptly and adequately? Um, hello? Terror attacks are even more of a surprise, and he heads the department that supposedly has been planning to deal with one for four years. It's his job to be prepared for surprises. But apparently he hasn't even heard of cable TV. Anyone watching a news channel would have known long before he said them that the things he was saying were not true.

Meme #2 is the "local officials were incomptent, and that messed us up" meme. It includes the absurd claim that the Governor of Louisiana hadn't actually declared a state of emergency, so they were legally blocked from deploying, the suggestion that they weren't asked to help, to the absurd idea that the feds were waiting to be told what the local governors wanted, and the state and local officals never called. As noted in my posting last week, it is only to be expected that local officials will be overburdened in such a disaster, which is the very reason we expect and demand federal involvement. But not only were the locals doing what they could, the suggestion that federal response was legally contingent upon local bureaucrats is absurd. Larry Johnson, at TPM Cafe, provides a pointer to the National Response Plan, adopted in the wake of 9/11, which gives broad federal authority to step in to respond to a terrorist attack, or natural disaster.

The locals might be klutzes, but that wouldn't absolve the feds of blame in any way. (Personally, I'm willing to cut the local officials some slack, since they are in the middle of the chaos themselves, even if I do have my doubts about their own preparedness: I've been wondering for days what kind of authority directs people to take shelter in facilities that don't already have stockpiles of water and basic rations for three days on hand.)

So far, neither meme seems to have deflated criticism anywhere but Fox News, (though even it is struggling, because some of its reporters on the scene keep trying to report actual human suffering instead of defending the administration.) Some have suggested that racism is involved in the poor response, but I think that rather than race, it was class. There are plenty of "po' white trash" homeless now, too. And it wasn't like the feds were good at sending buses and food into white areas, either. That Bush did a much better job with a hurricane in Florida has more to do with election-year timing, and saving his brother's reputation, than racism. To be blunt, I think W. is fine with wealthy Republican black folk. It's poor people he doesn't give a damn about.

Paul Krugman in his column this morning, sees the Katrina debacle as the logical result of the fundamental political philosophy of this administration.

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

There is something to this, I think. An administration that has been working feverishly to dismantle the New Deal has been doing its best to undermine federal disaster relief, another innovation of the New Deal period.

Krugman also hits the pathetic cronyism that is cast into tragic spotlight by the disaster. FEMA director Michael Brown is out of his depth, which is not surprising when you see his resume. The previous FEMA director got the job primarily by virtue of working in the President's campaign, and Brown by virtue of being the previous guy's college roommate. As Krugman notes:

Ideological cynicism about government easily morphs into a readiness to treat government spending as a way to reward your friends. After all, if you don't believe government can do any good, why not?

Which may explain two images from the past week that linger in my memory.

One was a press conference at which the head of our Homeland Security was telling a reporter that there was food and water at the Convention Center, and that people were being taken care of there, five minutes after a live MSNBC feed from the Convention Center showed hungry, thirsty people standing around chanting "Help! Help! Help!"

Another is the string of interviews with Michael Brown, who was always in a clean, well-pressed shirt, clean-shaven with no hair out of place. (Here's a hint: if you really want to convince someone that you're working hard on disaster relief, it helps to look like you've slept in your clothes on a cot in your office. That well-rested, clean and tidy thing is a dead give-away.)

They are working at it, but they still haven't quite gotten the trick to faking sincerity.