Bush Knew! Summon the Howling Mob!

Hmm….what’s in the news today? Let’s see: port flap (or have we reached a full-scale kerfuffle by now?), Cheney shooting (Someone wipe the froth from that Gregory guy’s lips and get him a blankie so he can lie down after such a tantrum), US/India nuclear deal (hey, look…we can do diplomacy. Unless somehow George W managed to noogie the Indian PM into submission), and Hurrican Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina? I believe we’ve breached a cardinal rule about reporting on hurricanes: the number of stories written about the hurricane should not be greater than the top wind speed of the hurricane. See, that would bring a certain sense of proportionality to the situation.

So what’s the Big Important Hurricane Story today?

Bush knew. He knew that New Orleans was in trouble because he was warned.

A newly leaked video recording of high-level government deliberations the day before Hurricane Katrina hit shows disaster officials emphatically warning President Bush that the storm posed a catastrophic threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and a grim-faced Bush personally assuring state leaders that his administration was “fully prepared” to help.

The footage, taken of a videoconference of federal and state officials on Aug. 28, offered an unusually vivid glimpse of real-time decision making by an administration that has vigorously guarded its internal deliberations.

DunDunDunnnnn!

And what’s the purpose of this story? Blame, folks. Pure, concentrated blame from the Eighth Dimension!

See, reporters are not merely content with reporting news. They must put news in context for you. They have to explain the news, to tell you why a story that no doubt has most of you saying “So?” and a few of you jumping up and down on your couches yelling “He Knew! He Knew! Impeach him!” actually belongs on the front page of the Washington Post.

I’m going to make a bold statement. Every single human being who saw a forecast map a couple days before the hurricane made landfall knew that New Orleans was in big-time trouble.

How could you see this photo and not think “Rut roh”?

Or this one?

(Images via NOAA)

I’m pretty sure that everyone on the planet that got a peek at that photo thought, “I’m sure glad I’m not anywhere near there!”.

Except for Ray Nagin, of course, who was thinking…well…who knows what the hell he was thinking? He certainly wasn’t thinking “Wow. I’d better evacuate my city. Better get all those schoolbuses fired up and on high ground!”. Oh, and Katherine Blanco who definitely wasn’t thinking “The President just offered all the help he has. I’d better use every last ounce of it because I’m going to need it”.

Besides them, everyone else was thinking that New Orleans was going to get slammed and it would be one hell of an idea if everyone in the city was a long, long way away before Katrina got there.

So it’s not news that the President was “warned” about Katrina. I was “warned” about Katrina, too, by my local weatherman, Doug Hill. You were “warned”, too.

The difference between George Bush and us, though, is that we don’t have a predatory media looking to rip yet another chunk out of our flank while we’re doing such unimportant things as running a war, trying to keep nukes out of the hands of burnoosed maniacs, looking for ways to keep a red-hot economy going strong, or any of the other hundred gazillion things this President has to get done. We’re just ordinary people who generally get the benefit of the doubt that we’re decent, hard-working, non baby-eating people from those around us.

Unlike George Bush who will, once again, have to send out a press secretary to tell us that indeed the President was concerned about the welfare of New Orleans and that he absolutely offered every bit of assistance. Worse, that secretary will have to remind us in gentle tones that the responsibility for coordinating the immediate disaster response belongs to the state and local governments and that FEMA is a whopping huge bureaucracy that is incapable, using any laws of physics that exist in this particular dimension of spacetime, or moving fast enough to get to a disaster scene as quickly as naysayers apparently wanted them to respond to New Orleans. That is, unless those Star Trekky transporter things get invented, at which point we’ll have us a government that can get anywhere, any time, as fast as we can get the people onto transporter pads.

Hoping, of course that we don’t have an incompetent transporter operator. Otherwise, that whole FEMA team’s going to end up looking like a bowl of cold Spaghetti O’s and that’ll be the end of transporter technology. We’ll stick them all in some warehouse somewhere right next to the Ark of the Covenant and those really nice rockets that took us to the moon and hardly every exploded.

And FEMA will still be the same Bureaucratic Brontosaurus it always has been and always will be. That’s the news here, really. But not many folks want to hear that. Too many shattered illusions, I suppose.

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Category: President George Bush, The Good Old US of A