"Katrina is such a big, swirling, all-consuming story, that the President's life IS changed for the foreseeable future.
"He can't pass Social Security. He can't be seen doing any other work. He can't go biking (we think).
"Even in the first half of 2001, even when the press wouldn't fully acknowledge him as President of the United States, the White House wasn't in a hole like this.
"Much of his agenda is incongruous with the pictures we are seeing behind Oprah in the Astrodome. The political advice of the Wall Street Journal ed board notwithstanding, this is not a politically smart time to talk tax cuts for the wealthiest."
Speaking of the blame game--and that's the White House line, that we shouldn't try to affix blame, at least not right now-- Arianna Huffington is firmly pro-blame:
"Look, if we've learned anything from watching shows like CSI, Law & Order, and their endless progeny, it's that you can't let a crime scene grow cold. You've got to start collecting and analyzing the evidence while the DNA is still fresh and let David Caruso or Vincent D'Onofrio start sweating the perps while the passions are still running high. And make no mistake, what we saw go down--and not go down--in New Orleans was definitely a crime . . . a crime that is in many ways still in progress.
"Sixty percent of the city remains underwater; up to 160,000 homes in the state of Louisiana have been submerged or destroyed; 60 to 90 million tons of solid waste need to cleaned up; experts warn that it make take 'years' to fully restore clean drinking water; and an outbreak of vibrio vulnificus--a cholera-like bacterial disease--has been reported among some Katrina evacuees.
"This is clearly going to be a very long recovery process. And the sooner we've identified those responsible for the Katrina tragedy, the sooner we can make sure they're not around to screw up the recovery.
So, yes, now is precisely the time for assessing blame. Let a thousand pointed fingers bloom!"
Tom Friedman gives the geopolitical analysis:
"If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina-- and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
"These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together."
Lots of online chatter about this Salt Lake Tribune piece:
"As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters-- his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week-- a battalion of [1,000] highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers. Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
"A team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas."
Well, that was a political emergency, wasn't it?
LAT columnist Max Boot has had it with what the White House likes to call the blame game:
"No sooner had Hurricane Katrina roared through Louisiana and adjacent states than every blockhead with a microphone or a word processor felt compelled to spout off about What It All Means--and, more important, Who Is to Blame . . . "Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on their television screens. Their hearts are breaking as they watch the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned. . . .
"What must they think of the talking heads who treat this as if it were another bit of minor grist for the political mills? As if this were another story about some politician's war record or a nominee's nanny issues. The callowness now on display goes a long way toward explaining why politicians and the media are held in public esteem somewhere above child molesters and below bankers."
Salon's Eric Boehlert, a charter member of the press-is-soft-on-Bush camp, has a far different view:
"The fact that this kind of aggressive questioning of people in power during times of crisis now passes as news itself only highlights just how timid the mainstream press corps has been during the Bush years.
"Is it too much to ask for Russert to just once have shown the same passion-- or even hint of outrage--when interviewing Vice President Dick Cheney about the administration's botched occupation of Iraq in which nearly 2,000 Americans have died? ('How could the president be so wrong, so misinformed?' Russert could have demanded.) Imagine if the press had shown a glimmer of its newfound truth-telling fervor while pursuing the WMD fiasco or uncovering the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth hoax last year, or half a dozen lesser episodes in which the Bush White House mugged the truth and the press knew it but then looked away.
"It's hard to decide which is more troubling: that it took the national press corps five years to summon up enough courage to report, without apology, that what the Bush administration says and does are often two different things, or that it took the sight of bodies floating facedown in the streets of New Orleans to trigger a change in the press's behavior."
By the way, I excerpted a Salon piece yesterday in which writer Stephen Elliott says he was told that Geraldo Rivera rescued an elderly woman twice, needing a retake for the cameras. Fox News says that's absolutely, positively not true.
