Someone's got to tell him. There are dead bodies floating down the street.
Well it ain't going to be me.
Get Scotty to tell him.
I'm not going to tell him.
I'm sure we've all read the Evan Thomas Newsweek piece by now.
More -
Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.
You know how much he likes his vacation.
I know, but it's only a couple of days and all hell is breaking loose. We need a Commander and Chief, not a couch potato.
How this could be--how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century--is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
You're the Chief-of-Staff; you tell him.
Hey - I'm the Chief-of-Staff precisely because I tell him what he wants to hear. You think he wants to hear that New Orleans has gone the way of Atlantis?
You're his lawyer, you tell him.
I'm his counsel, yeah, but I don't see what this has to do with me.
Do you think we could get his dad to tell him?
Tell him what? Son, you better turn on the TV?
After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job.
Where's Cheney?
Cleaning fish.
Where's Condi?
Buying shoes.
Let's pick straws.
Forget it.
Oh, hey there guys. What's going on?
Nothing.
Nothing Mr. President.
Everything is perfect, sir.
Good, good, that little storm down there go all right?
You bet sir, a little wind and rain never hurt anybody.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.
Anyway, the rest is history.
But I have to wonder.
What kind of monster do we have as President where his senior staff has to hold a conference call to decide who will be the bearer of bad news to this emperor with no clothes?
And conversely, what kind of spineless, sycophants does Bush select for his inner sanctum that produces such criminal cowardice and overwrought politicizing of catastrophe?
Did you tell him?
Fuck no. I made him a DVD of CNN, MSNBC and FOX. They told him.
Great idea. I'll have to remember that for next time.