Piecing together two very juicy
posts from Josh Marshall within the parameters mapped out by Sunday's MSM tick-tocks on the Hurricane, I now forcast that THIS SCANDAL, HAVING TAKEN OUT BROWNIE, HAS PAUSED ONLY TO GATHER STEAM. IT WILL REGAIN FULL FORCE AND SLAM INTO THE WHITE HOUSE SHORTLY.
Details after the jump ...
Marshall has links to two articles. The first details how Cheney's office intervened with power crews in South Mississippi on AUGUST 30 to have them get power to a pipeline rather than to hospitals. A pipeline, over hospitals!
Whoah. So SOMEONE in the WH (VP office) was paying attention to something ... Surprise. Oil. And ignoring something. Surprise. Poor people.
Well, maybe the pipeline is vital. I look forward to the presser where Scooter tries to explain just how vital.
Imagine the combustibility of this story if the protecting-oil-interests angle were to explode.
The second article describes how Chertoff, rather than declare Katrina a catastrophe immediately, deferred to a White House working group meeting on the subject first.
One way of looking at this is that Chertoff didn't take initiative. Another way is to see the WH as keeping DHS reined in and not letting it do its job. The latter is more consistent with this Administration's M.O. of concentrating all power in the WH and keeping the cabinet secretaries relatively powerless.
Putting this together, and imagining what will happen as the "blame game" gets "played" with Administration officals as the "players" rather than the press, it looks like this could get MUCH WORSE for the White House ahead.
All it would take would be just one pissed-off DHS exec (or ... FORMER exec) to leak one email from the WH to DHS saying, hey, wait a minute, we're going to oversee this storm, don't do anything until we convene some meetings, we are hearing from our big oil friends that this and such needs doing ...
And then the heads that start rolling (houses of Card falling?) will be in the WH not in DHS ...
Fasten your seatbelts, kossacks ...