Maureen Dowd once again does an incisive and accurate skewing of W. in today's NYT. It's not her best column, but always there are some juicy tidbits and lines that make me smile and shout "Amen sister!"
Jump down for excerpts and a free link to the full column.
Down does a good job of pointing out Bushco's Achilles heel in responding to Rita and future disasters, which is something I've been thinking about all week. The better they respond to Rita just serves to highlight how inept they were with Katrina:
The more tuned-in W. is now, the more obvious it is that he tuned out as New Orleans drowned. There is a high cost for presidential learning curves.
A lot of elderly hospital and nursing home patients died in New Orleans before W. could pay attention to Houston and Galveston.
Dowd also calls W. to task for his bizarre and disgusting attempt to link Katrina with the terrorists:
On Wednesday, Stormy tried to make one of his strained linkages, this time with Katrina and terror. The terrorists, he said, were "the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it," while he is the kind of person who looks at Katrina and tries to energize himself to deal with natural disasters by thinking, What if this had been done by terrorists?
And Dowd states the obvious, but necessarily so, in pointing out the futility in Bush trying to continue to insiste that everything is A-OK in Iraq:
On Thursday, he tried to move past the image he had projected of a lost boy wandering alone in the storm, and stood at the Pentagon flanked by his war council, talking about how he was moving to "develop a secure, safe democracy in Iraq." Unfortunately, the Saudi foreign minister was in town dropping a bomblet by saying that Iraq was going down the tubes, a judgment other Sunni Arab leaders had been conveying privately.
Down describes Bush as trying to "move past the image he had projected of a lost boy wandering alone in the storm." I love that image. And the money line comes at the end:
But before he chases any more wind tunnels, Stormy should heed the Bob Dylan line: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
Read the full column (free) here.