Republicans Blister White House and DHS Response to Katrina

A House Investigative Committee composed entirely of Republicans will officially issue their findings as early as today on the Federal preparedness and response during Hurricane Katrina. The stinging five-hundred plus page document characterizes the poorly planned and badly coordinated Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and White House response to the disaster as "dismal".

President Bush: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Good Morning America on 9/1/05 (Video at Crooks and Liars).

Even the House GOP committee gagged on that one, saying in part:

[CNN] "It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which specific dire warnings had been issued for days. This crisis was not only predictable, it was predicted," the committee said.

Remember that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Meet the Press (And with a straight face mind you):

[MTP Transcript 9/4/05] "I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet.'"

Leaving aside the disturbing implication that the head of the DHS was relying on newspapers to get his information about a national emergency. Ignoring that out of 400 headlines that ran that Tuesday morning, all of them said the exact opposite. What makes that dodge so particularly outrageous, is that his own department reportedly predicted the flooding a few days beforehand and then, according to Brownie under oath, confirmed it the day the storm hit:

[Wapo] In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.

[YAHOO NEWS] Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., asking about Brown's conversation with Hagin on the evening of Aug. 29. "Did you tell Mr. Hagin in that phone call that New Orleans was flooding?" ... Brown answered: "I think I told him that we were realizing our worst nightmare, that everything we had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true."

A few more highlights and conclusions:

"Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," the report states. [...] The federal government's response was marked "fecklessness, flailing and organisational paralysis". [...] "Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare," said a summary of the scathing report.

Feel safer yet? There are so many instances of what can only be interpreted as paranoid behavior, incompetence, misinformation, scandals in various states of legal and journalistic illumination, or blatant lying, now plaguing this White House, that just trying to keep up with them all is bewildering. But from Loose-lips Libby to Heckuva-job Brownie to Dead-eye Dick, perhaps a useful unifying framework to keep it all sorted out is the apparent Bush and Company gub'mint playbook:

• Step 1: Screw-up
• Step 2: Evade, spin, and Cover-up
• Step 3: When it's too late Show-up
• Step 4: Quietly Lawyer-up
  
• Step 5: Finally, promise to cooperate and then Clam-up

Maybe the powers that be lost the next page out of the playbook, or they would know Step 5 is traditionally followed by Step 6 in which voters demonstrate at the polls that they're fed-up. Or Step 6a; after which the guilty and the complicit are locked-up.