This started out as a comment, but I've been thinking about it for quite some time. What is it with the Republicans, blame, and accountability? I think we have to conclude that they think that blame and accountability are for suckers, not Republicans. And even if they take the "blame," they believe it shouldn't have any consequences.
Take Katrina. There are probably thousands of videos of Chertoff talking about the need to "do something now," and to leave the "after action reports" for later. But did we ever find out anything about what they learned? No. As for Bush, as usual he wanted to skim the credit for what relief workers did while deflecting criticism of the cronies he used to cripple the federal government:
As for blunders in the federal response, "I'm not going to defend the process going in," Bush said. "I am going to defend the people saving lives."
He praised relief workers at all levels. "I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there," he said.
Bush spoke after R. David Paulison, the new acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, pledged to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina survivors now in shelters.
It was the closest Bush has come to publicly finding fault with any federal officials involved in the hurricane response, which has been widely criticized as disjointed and slow. Some federal officials have sought to fault state and local officials for being unprepared to cope with the disaster.
So what about 9/11? Surely by now the Bush Administration has finally accepted blame for that catastrophe. Well, no, not exactly. As late as 2006, they were still trying to hoist blame onto the Clinton Administration:
what really teed off the Bushies is that Clinton then said that his successor "did not try" to kill or stop bin Laden for the first eight months in office — that is, the eight months before the 9/11 atttacks. The Bush White House has always been hugely sensitive about this charge because, well, there is some truth to it. The new administration came into office and put terror about third or fourth down on its list of big worries, behind Russia, the ABM treaty, and sorting out that unexpected spy plane problem with the Chinese. (Many Republicans just refuse to believe this.)
Well what about Iraq? With over 15 million google entries on "blame" and "Iraq," the first thing to note is that there is enough blame to go around. But in terms of blame that should rightly be directed to the Bush Administration, the first entry doesn't come until 2007, after the Democratic Congress was elected to get us out of there, when Bush declared:
WASHINGTON — President Bush acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that he erred by not ordering a military buildup in Iraq last year and said he was increasing U.S. troops by 21,500 to quell the country's near-anarchy. "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," Bush said
So in the case of Iraq, Bush decided to take blame to get more troops to Iraq. That hardly seems like accountability.
When it comes to torture, the Bush Administration is really a piece of work. In an interview with a British journalist, Bush lauded the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo (no blame necessary there!), declared that torturing was "not what I was doing," and finally deflected the blame for his torture policy onto, among others, the soldiers who carried out his policy.
Bush is adhering to a schedule of major calamities every 2 years. 9/11 in 2001, Iraq War in 2003, Katrina in 2005, constitutional shredding throughout, and public disclosure that we are a torturing nation throughout 2007.
We are now in the runup to the calamity of 2009. The financial meltdown is a little ahead of schedule, but we should anticipate that it will ripen, blamelessly, until 2009, when Obama takes over. I'm sure Bush's Republican enablers will return blame to its rightful place, and with a vengeance, then.