Ever woke up in a fog? Perhaps after a bad night's sleep - a few too many martinis, you don't remember what day it is? Can't measure out the coffee the next morning the way your spouse likes it?
That's apparently the excuse the White House is giving for it's Katrina response. And the investigating Republicans make unusually pointed swipes at the foggy film-over.
From the New York times this morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The Fogman, Mr. Kenneth Rapuano, Mr. Bush's deputy domestic security advisor and the official in charge of managing storm events, stated in a closed door meeting with House committee aids that
he left the White House about 10 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, the night the storm hit. Some two hours later, the White House received a report indicating that a major levee in New Orleans had been breached and that most of the city had already been flooded. The report was sent by an official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had flown over the city late that afternoon.
But Mr. Rapuano said that before he left that night, the White House received a separate report from the Army Corps of Engineers saying an evaluation of the levees was still under way.
The White House, Mr. Rapuano said, finally received confirmation about the levee breach about 6 a.m. on Tuesday, the morning after it occurred. But even then, it does not appear that word got immediately to Mr. Bush, who was on vacation and who later said that he had had a "sense of relaxation" and had thought the city had "dodged a bullet."
Investigators had requested copies of White House e-mails written during the crucial hours after the response (the lead investigator probably had more success obtaining a perusal of his female teenager's diary). They were allowed this short briefing from Bush's staff.
"We are left with a picture of a White House that was plagued by the fog of war," said David Marin, the Republican staff director to the House committee investigating the government's response to the hurricane. "The committee is likely to find a disturbing inability by the White House to de-conflict and analyze information -- and that had consequences."
Trent Duffy, the deputy White House press secretary, who also attended the briefing, acknowledged that all levels of the government had suffered from a lack of clarity about the events as they developed.
"There was a lack of situational awareness at all levels," Mr. Duffy said in an interview on Friday. "That is one of the biggest lessons everyone in emergency preparedness has learned because of the storm."
With the House not yet in session, only one lawmaker from the investigative committee -- its chairman, Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia -- was present for the briefing. Mr. Rapuano told him and the staff investigators that the White House role had been to monitor the situation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, were operationally in charge, he said.
The investigators expressed frustration that the White House did not seem to have been more actively involved. But Mr. Duffy, echoing a point made by Mr. Rapuano, said: "The White House should not be making combat decisions in Iraq. The same is true for a domestic emergency response."
Didn't somebody have to actually make a video of the flooded city, with people screaming from rooftops and bodies floating downstream before Bush was willing to take a day off from vacation?
The committee staff members also asked why it had taken Mr. Bush until the following Saturday, nearly a week after the storm, to order a large number of federal troops to the Gulf Coast.
Mr. Rapuano said that the Pentagon had already started to send troops and that in fact 5,000 of them had arrived by that point.
Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, had asked for many more three days earlier, but Mr. Rapuano said the problem was that she had not provided specifics as to what kind of troops she needed.
Reflexive kneejerk moment - blame it on the Democrats.
If the investigators cannot determine, through either testimony or written correspondence, what various presidential aides knew, and when, it will be hard to pinpoint where failures occurred within the White House, said Mr. Marin, the staff director for the House committee.
"There is a difference between having enough information to find institutional fault, which we have," he said, "and having information to assign individual blame, which in large part we don't."
The Republicans blame themselves? Should I do a poll for guesstimates concerning the longevity of Mr. Marin's professional governmental career?