(Super top secret Bush administration round table discussion....)
Hmmm...who can we blame while we tell others not to point at us?
First, the victims themselves. They really hosed things up. So damned incovenient. And very, very black, as Wolfie would say. Wait. That didn't work. My poll numbers are still dropping, Turdblossom!!
Okay, how 'bout the Governor and Mayor...heh, heh, heh....
No, that didn't work either!
Let's use the damned librul media to blame it on the damned librul media! Bring out them confidential synonymous sources, Karl. Serve that New York Times right. They didn't tell us nothing. We didn't get 'good reliable information' on the ground. Yeah. That's it. The 'Murkins are too busy to watch television; I think they'll buy it:
NYT 9/10/05
The president, long reluctant to fire subordinates, came to a belated recognition that his administration was in trouble for the way it had dealt with the disaster, many of his supporters say. One moment of realization occurred on Thursday of last week when an aide carried a news agency report from New Orleans into the Oval Office for him to see.
In the Bush administration, the only recognition is always "belated."
The report was about the evacuees at the convention center, some dying and some already dead. Mr. Bush had been briefed that morning by his homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, who was getting much of his information from Mr. Brown and was not aware of what was occurring there. The news account was the first that the president and his top advisers had heard not only of the conditions at the convention center but even that there were people there at all.
"He's not a screamer," a senior aide said of the president. But Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on.
"The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information," said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. "Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult."
Oh, Dubya's not a screamer, all right. But he sure is a scream. Inevitably I wind up looking just like that famous painting, every time he opens his mouth, but never moreso than that week we weren't getting "reliable information" about the starving dying people in New Orleans.
More screams, just ahead:
But the political pressures on Mr. Bush, and the anxiety at the White House, were only growing. Behind the president's public embrace of Mr. Brown was the realization within the administration that the director's ignorance about the evacuees had further inflamed the rage of the storm's poor, black victims and created an impression of a White House that did not care about their lives.
Now, what would give them thatidea, Mr. Bush?
One prominent African-American supporter of Mr. Bush who is close to Karl Rove, the White House political chief, said the president did not go into the heart of New Orleans and meet with black victims on his first trip there, last Friday, because he knew that White House officials were "scared to death" of the reaction.
"If I'm Karl, do I want the visual of black people hollering at the president as if we're living in Rwanda?" said the supporter, who spoke only anonymously because he did not want to antagonize Mr. Rove.
http://nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10crisis.html?hp&ex=1126411200&en=5e1
94c087578e640&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Is this the best defense they can come up with?
Oh yeah what a scream!