After a week of watching rampant incompetence in the response to the Katrina catastrophe, it is impressive to see, for a change, the performance of capable, well-trained disaster recovery professionals. I'm referring to the disaster-recovery professionals at Rove & Co. The combination of stonewalling about the federal government's mistakes last week ("there will be time for that later") and shifting the blame to the Democrats running the show in Lousiana is
brilliant. Sheer genius!
(The good folks at TPM, who are trying to dissect the misinformation generated by the Bush administration, are
wasting their time. The audience for the lies doesn't care to read rebuttals; they just want a straw to grasp.)
Karl Rove has discovered a failsafe teflon recipe! Thanks to it the most incompetent president in memory has become politically invulnerable.
Democrats have routinely overestimated the political fallout of Bush's disasters, or rather, underestimated Rove's ability to avoid it. The post-Katrina debacle is no exception. Bush will almost certainly slip out of this one too. I don't see how the Democrats can possibly prevent it. I guess they'll have to remain equally tight-lipped (lest they appear partisan) while at the same time pushing hard for an investigation, ASAP (if they manage to scramble for a spine, that is), and hope for the best.