Is Bush in a bubble where contrarian views (to the administrations's position...not reality) are simply unacceptable? In
President Bush: Living Too Much in the Bubble? Time reports he has become dangerously isolated from reality.
The President's Increasing Isolation: A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President's increasing isolation. Bush's bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news--or tell him when he's wrong. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. "The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me," the aide recalled about a session during the first term. "Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, `All right. I understand. Good job.' He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom."
Maureen Dowd in her recent piece also writes:
W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.
So what were the consequences of being in this bubble? Maureen Dowd's piece in NY Times, brings to light a few stories on the tragic and gruesome death of sick and elderly patients in New Orleans because they were BETRAYED by the government.
Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.
You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.
At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.
Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."
At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.
As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."
So, how does the administration plan to deal with this fiasco? A Three-Part comeback plan reports Time Magazine.
The first: Spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later. "Nothing can salve the wounds like money," said an official who helped develop the strategy. "You'll see a much more aggressively engaged President, traveling to the Gulf Coast a lot and sending a lot of people down there."
[NOTE: REUTERS reports that FIRMS WITH TIES TO BUSH-CHENEY are getting the relief and recontructions contracts in the aftermath of Katrina]
The second tactic could be summed up as, don't look back. The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials.
The third move: Develop a new set of goals to announce after Katrina fades. Advisers are proceeding with plans to gin up base-conservative voters for next year's congressional midterm elections with a platform that probably will be focused around tax reform. Because Bush will need a dynamic salesman to make sure that initiative goes better than his Social Security proposal, advisers tell TIME there is once again talk of replacing Treasury Secretary John Snow.
Admission of responsibility comes too late. Spin is not going work this time, writes Maureen Dowd:
He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.
How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?.....
The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.