This poll is very interesting. Looks like the country is pretty much split on party lines on blaiming Bush for the disaster.

This one shows a clear majority criticising Bush’s response.

Abb1 is a disgruntled leftist contrarian whom I know very well (in the blog sense of “know”). I can’t follow him on the peculiar Musharraf tangent he’s chosen to take.

The topic of this thread was Bush’s performance. You want it to be “What do we do now?”, but it isn’t. These are different questions. If we were first responders, we wouldn’t be talking about Bush’s accountability much—we’d be too busy. But we aren’t first responders. We’re blog commenters.

Bush’s accountability is important for those of us who don’t live in LA because he has national responsibilities. The evidence we’ve seen that FEMA and DHS are incapable of functioning is pretty frightening. Bush’s personal non-responses and misreponses in this case are worrisome too. These are legitimate things to talk about.

Local responsibility is a separable problem. Very few are defending Blanco and the NO mayor. Yglesias and DeLong slammed them hard. Their culpability takes nothing away from Bush’s. This is a red herring—there’s enough blame to go around. (LA Democrats are mostly low-tax low-service conservatives in the pocket of big oil and big business. Why should I defend them?)

Your point of view seems to be that partisan criticisms are always wrong. This is an ignorant, knee-jerk assumption characteristically held by people who think of themselves as being wise and above the battle. In fact partisan politics is one of the main ways accountability is assigned in two-party democratic political systems. Perhaps your distaste for Democrats or lingering affection for the Republicans prevents you from being able to say that Bush failed disastrously, but that’s your own personal problem.

Dave F:

People who insist Bush should simply have wrested control of the National Guard effort from Blanco….”

This is a red herring too. Republicans have zeroed in on this particular issue, like the violence issue, because they think it makes Bush look good and the Democrats look bad. There are dozens of issues which are equally important.

What more needs to be said about this? It’s not like there’s ambiguity or wiggle room here.

[Aside to Jet, after which I’ll let this rest: Thanks for the little trip down memory lane in #54, Dude. Exactly as I remember it. See, I didn’t know any of M.I.A.’s lyrics (it’s not like they’re clearly comprehensible on her records) and I’d never read an interview or article about her. I only knew that I liked her tunes. So I asked if somebody could fill me in on the backstory. And you responded by putting made-up words in my mouth, solely in order to slander me. And when called on your shit, your response was “Well, he’s always mean to me, so he deserves it, so nyah.”

That pretty much sums up the “value-added” you provide to CT, as John E puts it.]

What sort of a scale would one use to balance the culpability of a poor state and a poor city of medium size (population less than a million) against the capability of the planet’s only superpower?

Perhaps the blame should be apportioned by the size of each polity’s budget.

The BBC website has a good and succinct piece apportioning the layers of blame—federal, state and local—today. I can just see them being accused of supporting/bashing Bush—this issue has been party-politicised to the detriment of the hapless NO victims.

Jet,

(That’s you describing me – and I’m not making that up!) Here is your comment about literacy in Japan, which I didn’t bother replying to for reasons explained in the thread; and here is my reply to your comment regarding gas fatalities in WW1. In the former thread you also cited evidence that Muqtada al-Sadr “is about as popular as a dog turd at a wedding”. If you knew how radically the planet you describe differs from Earth, you wouldn’t be surprised that your comments are memorable.

I don’t need the $20 right now so please donate it to charity.

Here is the voice of George W. Bush himself, in the proclamation issued in his name, over his signature on Saturday, August 27, 2005:

“The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing. The President’s action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures”

Bush goes on to say: “Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”

Sebastian,
what I was trying say is that the problem is probably more systemic than episodic.

Personal anecdote: I asked a Pakistani guy at the office a couple of years ago: you used to have a democratic government and now it’s a military dictatorship – how do you feel about it? The guy said something like this, he said: with the democratic government a fellow who just gave a bribe would meet the next guy coming with bribe on his way out. He said it’s much better with Musharraf now.

I’m not saying that military dictatorship is a solution, but there’s certainly a problem, especially when one party controls everything, like in the US now.

By the way, John, abb1 is your standard left-winger who’s pissed off with the Democrats (and let’s face it, the Democratic leadership in Louisiana hasn’t covered itself in glory over Katrina, even though the miserable failure of the Federal government is obviously a more important issue for every serious observer). So he’s basically on your side (and not an agent provocateur, aka troll), since you’re not unknown to criticise the Democrats yourself.

But the real problem here is surely that the United States has been shown to have an amazingly incompetent administration at a number of levels. What’s more, this was predicted by various observers, all of whom had political axes to grind, but not all of whom were so partisan that they couldn’t be trusted. It could have been predicted, for instance, through the unbelievable catastrophe of Iraq since the fall of Baghdad.

And the big question is, what are we all going to do about it? Not just Americans, and not just Democrats, most of whose leaders, frankly, I wouldn’t use as a toilet-brush. It’s the whole world at risk, because the more incompetent a state is, and the more it promotes internal conflict through class warfare and corruption, the more dangerous it becomes. What’s more, many overseas countries are mirroring the United States, partly because it’s such an attractive model for corrupt oligarchs, partly because the elite is easily bought off.

What are we gonna do now, John?