After all, it’s not as if Donohue has been secretive about his motives or desires. In a recent Women’s Wear Daily profile , Donohue bragged about his ability to manufacture controversy:
BILL DONOHUE: THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE’S ATTACK DOG
In December 2005, a reporter from the Washington Post asked the Catholic League’s president, William Donohue, if he was offended that President Bush’s season’s greetings card did not specifically mention Christmas.
“At first, it didn’t bother me,” Donohue recalled in a recent interview. “I said, ‘So what. All presidents have had cards like this.’”
But when told by the reporter that everyone from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton had at least one Christmas card where they mentioned something religious, Donohue pounced.
The following day, in the Post’s page-one story, Donohue rebuked the most conspicuously Christian president in 25 years for not being Christian enough. “This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” he said in the article.
“Good Morning America” booked Donohue for an interview. And the next year, the Catholic League’s president received an invitation to the White House Christmas party.
“Basically, I got rewarded for attacking him,” Donohue happily concluded. “Here at the Catholic League, we’ll give you an opinion on the weather if you want it.”
It’s this ability to manufacture controversy that has brought a moribund advocacy group firmly into the black and turned Donohue into catnip for the press. For talk show bookers and reporters on deadline, he’s a never-ending sideshow who comes ever ready to hurl expressions of indignation and opprobrium at anyone who might have offended him. As prejudice against individual Catholics has receded, Donohue has simply turned up the volume, taking aim at everyone who questions the church’s official positions on homosexuality, abortion and birth control, lapsed Catholics included.
Last year, Donohue urged Sony to put a disclaimer at the beginning of “The Da Vinci Code.” Then came Madonna - “Just when I thought we’d gotten rid of her,” he lamented - who yanked his chain when she decided to sing part of her concert against a cross. Just before Christmas, Donohue chewed out the film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein yet again for their decision to open the horror film “Black Christmas” on Jesus’ birthday. It’s at least the third time he’s attacked the filmmakers, the others being for the movies “Priest” and “Dogma.”
“It’s not so much the plot of ‘Black Christmas’ that bothers us,” Donohue told the New York Post’s Page Six. “It’s the fact that the Weinstein boys are back again, choosing a title and an opening date to make their latest statement.”
Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for the Weinsteins, said of Donohue: “He’s helpful to have. He raises money by getting his name in the paper, the movie gets press and the columnist gets an item. Everyone wins.”
But the same thing that keeps Donohue in the press prevents him from becoming truly respectable within the religious community, where his antics are a source of frequent consternation.
Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College said, “He’s a thug. He reverts to bullying because he thinks that’s what the job entails.”
Rev. Mark Massa, a Jesuit priest and co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, accused Donohue of being unable to differentiate between healthy debate and real religious bigotry. “Not everyone who criticizes the church is anti-Catholic,” he said.
The editors at the Catholic weekly magazine America seem to agree. In 2000, they chastised Donohue for denouncing movies he hadn’t even watched. “While being first may increase one’s chances of attracting media attention, there is a danger that the Catholic League reinforces the stereotype that the Catholic Church is at best unreflective and at worst unfairly biased and paranoid,” wrote Rev. James Martin. “In the long run, this may do more harm to the church’s reputation than a short-lived movie or play.”
Bitch Ph.D. argues that Donohue’s bullying tactics constitute abuse, and I’m inclined to agree: this episode has all the trappings of a Salem witch-hunt.
At the Frameshop Jeffrey Feldman has some specific suggestions about what we can do to prevent this from happening again the future:
Effective immediately, Frameshop is calling for the following actions to be taken against Bill Donohue and his followers:
All Democratic and Republican Party leaders should jointly condemn the threats to sodomize, rape and murder of Amanda Marcotte by Bill Donohue and his followers.
The IRS should immediately investigate the non-profit status of Bill Donohue’s Catholic League under the suspicion that his organization has violated its 501(c)(3) status.
The Attorney General of the City of the New York should immediately inquire as to the connection between Bill Donohue’s and his followers who threatened to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte.
The FBI should track down the men who issued the threats to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte .
All media outlets must cease to invite Bill Donohue on the air.
As Richard Blair points out at The All-Spin Zone, “Republican smear attacks against one Democratic candidate are attacks against all Democratic candidates.”
That this particular attack involved a widespread, misleading, defamatory personal campaign of harassment against two women whose positions Donohue routinely distorted, and that mass media outlets publicized without correction or contextualization, is an outrage.
I didn’t post about Bush’s ridiculous claim, this past weekend, that his administration has never had a “stay the course” policy in Iraq. It just seemed too . . . too obvious a lie, even for this administration, for it to be taken seriously by anyone. The evidence to the contrary is out there, and we’re living in the YouTube age; some industrious teenager has, no doubt, already compiled a series of clips of Bush saying the words “stay the course” over and over again, with “Would I Lie to You?” playing in the background.
But Bush’s assertion has, apparently, gone unchallenged by CBS and the AP (via Atrios). This silence on the part of the mainstream press goes way beyond attack-poodle punditry (poodluntrity?). We have arrived at a point when even the most basic, the most obvious, the most bold-faced of lies is allowed to propagate itself, like a virus, throughout the media landscape, without even so much as an antibody in sight. The sad thing is that we reached that point five years ago.
Lord, November 7th can’t come soon enough, can it?
There is one constituency I worry about, though, in all of this: the Republican pundits. After months — nay, years — of faithfully regurgitating the Republic “stay the course” mantra, these pundits have been left abruptly by the President with no rhetorical ground upon which to stand. The script has been changed at the last minute; all of those perfectly-timed sneers and knowing smiles will now have to be reworked into an entirely new routine.
That’s got to be a hard life, being a Republican marionette whose handlers have started to tangle all of the strings. But, I’ll say one thing for them: those suckers sure know how to dance.
I just wish they’d tango out of the room, already.
Update:Think Progress has a nice collection of “stay the course” clips (second video on that page). Sadly, The Eurythmics do not make an appearance.
It was a cultural moment whose significance (like Oprah’s influence) should not be underestimated. You can read excerpted transcripts from the show on Oprah’s site, which includes a primer on developing critical literacy. Rich, who was, as always, an astute, eloquent, and observant speaker, described the deceptive selling of the War in Iraq and the ways in which those initial untruths have haunted the war (and the Bush Administration) ever since.
Speaking about media coverage of the war, Rich said:
The problem in Iraq is that it is so unsafe. A very brave war correspondent for the Times said two weeks ago that 98 percent of the country—and in Baghdad in particular—reporters can’t go to because it’s just too dangerous. More reporters have been killed in this war than any modern war. At a certain point, a place like the New York Times or ABC News has to say, you cannot get killed for the story. That in itself tells us something that the country is so unsafe that we can’t cover it. We rely on Iraqis to cover it and the Iraqis often are so frightened of being seen working for Americans that they won’t reveal their identities to their own families as journalists.
Oprah’s show was telecast only a day after a new report in The Lancet (free registration required) revealed just how superficial our knowledge of the war in Iraq really is. The Lancet study estimated that 665,000 “excess deaths” (see Majikthise’s post on the methodology) have occurred in Iraq since the U.S. invasion:
We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.
Think about that number for a minute. Or, devote a second to thinking about each one of those deaths.
What, you don’t have 655,000 seconds to spare?
According to this site, a city with a population of 655,000 people would rank as the eighteenth largest city in the U.S. — above Baltimore.
655,000 excess deaths. A city bigger than Baltimore. It boggles the mind.
Rich didn’t mention the Lancet study, which was mostly likely published after the show was taped. But he did talk about the television coverage of the war. He noted that the networks presented us with long shots of bombs exploding, but that we never saw the street-level effects of those bombs. It was like a fireworks display, he said. Another guest, Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, added that no country would be able to sustain war if citizens were able to see its real consequences.
One woman got up and said that she had never thought about the television coverage in that way — that she had never considered the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and babies who died in those attacks.
655,000 excess deaths: it’s long past time for Americans to start thinking about that.
Postscript:
It’s exactly the type of person who hasn’t thought much about the Iraq War that Oprah’s show is able to reach.
Oprah mentioned during the broadcast that when she did a show, before the beginning of the Iraq War, that asked “Is War the Only Answer,” she got the worst hate-mail of her entire career in television. One correspondent called her an “incredible treasonous bitch.” Another said, “I wish you would choke on the ashes of 9/11.” One person told her to “take your hairy black ass back to Africa.”
I think it’s important that readers of this site thank Oprah for doing this show. In one hour of broadcast television, she brought Frank Rich’s analysis of “truthiness” into more living rooms than most bloggers could ever hope to reach. Please write to her here.
It was an examination of a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review called Failures of Imagination. The article provides more evidence that U.S. newspaper editors buried important news stories about torture that, had they been given adequate attention in 2003, might possibly have prevented the later abuses at Abu Ghraib:
[New York Times reporter Carlotta] Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.”
Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”
Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)
“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.”
Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)
Gall, who is British, chalks up the delay to reluctance to “believe bad things of Americans,” and in particular to a kind of post-9/11 sentiment. “There was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor and copy editor,” she says. “I remember a foreign-desk editor telling me, ‘Remember where we are — we can smell the debris from 9/11.’”
[. . .]
The skepticism back in 2003 about Gall’s findings wasn’t limited to the Times. The evidence of homicides got only a short mention on CNN and a brief write-up inside The Washington Post. The biggest follow-up came not in any American paper but in the Sunday Telegraph of London.
“There was no great urge to follow up,” Gall says. “Nobody went to the doorstep of the pathologist or anything like that, until of course Abu Ghraib. And I don’t know why.”
The next time you hear a conservative talking about “the liberal media,” ask him or her whether newspaper editors were right to bury reports of torture in 2003. Not that it will make any difference . . . the conservative fantasy of “the liberal media” is antithetical to everything we know about the reality of coverage of the War in Iraq.
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray has put together a post that casts further doubts on the viability of the recent British terror plot (via reader RG). Murray writes:
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth.
[. . .]
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
Murray’s post is directly in line with the suspicions I raised in last Sunday’s post about the timing of the arrests. After reading NBC’s report, in which sources claimed that the attacks were not imminent, that the suspects had neither passports nor plane tickets, and that the Bush administration pressured the U.K. government to make the arrests before the investigation was complete, I argued that the entire affair had been politically motivated:
This goes way beyond what we understood previously — that the Bush Administration knew about the arrests ahead of time, and timed a PR offensive against the Democrats around it.
It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.
For the GOP, the short term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.
It’s looking more and more possible that this terror plot was a blatant attempt by the U.S. and U.K. governments to alter the news cycles in their respective countries. It’s long past time for journalists to start investigating these stories more fully before beginning their feeding frenzies.
Or, as Atrios puts it, “It’s increasingly likely that the whole British plot wasn’t much more of a big deal than the idiotic nonsense in Florida awhile back. Certainly as of yet there’s nothing to indicate that FULL PANIC MODE AT THE AIRPORTS and cable news’ return to 24 hour OH MY GOD THEY’RE GOING TO BOMB THE SHOPPING MALLS mode had any justification whatsoever.”
The fact that several hijackers had neither passports nor plane tickets seems to have come as a surprise to Andrew Sullivan, but it’s nothing that readers of this site didn’t already know.
________________________
Having patted myself on the back for one post, I must give myself a demerit for another. My last piece, “Sugarcoating Torture,” which criticized a Malkin guest-blogger for using euphemisms to describe torture, nevertheless accepted too readily the claim that the London arrests challenged the widely held belief that information gleaned from torture cannot be trusted. Having already detailed the ways in which the arrests were politically motivated, I should have put two and two together and realized that if the alleged plot was uncovered using torture, that was all the more reason to doubt it.
Over the last few years, there have been several occasions when — for all my skepticism about the Bush administration’s politicization of terror alerts — I’ve been surprised at how my skepticism, even cynicism, about terror alerts just can’t keep pace with the administration’s bad faith.
I’m not ready to say the London bomb plot is another bamboozlement. It at least seems clear the Brits were involved in a serious investigation. But even this case now seems to be turning out to be less than met the eye. And there are real grounds to question whether Bush and Blair jumped the gun for reasons other than counter-terrorism. We’ll see.
The New York Timesreports this morning that President Bush used an expletive while talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair:
He went on to say the U.N. should directly enlist the Syrians to intervene. “I feel like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad.
“See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.
The web edition of the Times initially reported Bush’s word as “[expletive]”; it has since put the word “shit” onto its web page, figuring, I guess, that you can’t write an entire article about a curse word without revealing what that curse actually was.
The Times also tells us that Bush made the remark while he “thoughtfully chewed on a roll.” I ask you to watch the video for yourself, and decide whether you would describe his mastication in the same way. To me, he looks like a cow chomping on a piece of cud. Don’t they teach table manners at Andover?
The incident is perhaps a minor one, but it nevertheless reveals something about Bush’s “diplomacy.” Recent Time cover stories notwithstanding, it appears that “cowboy diplomacy” remains the lay of the land.
James Wolcott argued recently that the real problem on the world stage has to do with the overproduction of testosterone — or, as he put it, “male arrogance and insanity sheathed in metal.”
In light of today’s diplomatic incident, I find it hard to disagree — the current warmongering and posturing does seem emblematic of “brute expressions of patriarchal force.” And, though Wolcott’s post does reify traditional gender stereotypes, it’s hard to complain about that at a time when many world leaders are living up to them.
But Bush has always been a taker, not a giver. He wasn’t giving Merkel a massage, he was taking possession of her, letting everybody know, “This little lady’s mine.” I wonder what Merkel’s husband thought of Bush’s handy familiarity. I can’t imagine Laura Bush was too thrilled.
No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of the free world, he brings the same DKE bearing and cadences, the same insouciance and smart-alecky attitude, the same simplistic approach — swearing, swaggering, talking to Tony Blair with his mouth full of buttered roll, and giving a startled Angela Merkel an impromptu shoulder rub. He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.
[. . . ]
He treated Tony “As It Were” Blair like the servant in “The Remains of the Day,’’ blowing off his offer to help with the Israel-Lebanon crisis, and changing the subject from substance to fluff at one point, noting about his 60th-birthday Burberry gift: “Thanks for the sweater. Awfully thoughtful of you.’’ Then he razzed the British prime minister, who was hovering and wheedling like an abused wife: “I know you picked it out yourself.”
After doing his best to undermine the U.N. and Kofi Annan, W. talked about the secretary general like a fraternity pledge he wanted to send out for more beer or a keg of Diet Coke: “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.’’
ULAN BATOR, Mongolia, Oct. 22 - Mongolia has 131 soldiers in Iraq, and on Saturday it received an official American statement of gratitude from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Rumsfeld came to Ulan Bator to deliver that message personally, and he was given a horse.
In dazzling sunlight on the grounds of the Mongolian Defense Ministry, Mr. Rumsfeld took the reins of the calm gelding and said, “I am proud to be the owner of that proud animal.” He immediately announced that he would name the horse Montana, because the dusty plains and mountains that ring the Mongolian capital reminded him of that Rocky Mountain state.
The entire exchange recalled an ancient era of alliance and conquest, when a warrior’s word was law and the long knives were carried in the open.
The horse, a rich latte hue with a mane and tail the color of dark-roast coffee, was described by local officials as a traditional domesticated Mongolian breed.
Mr. Rumsfeld owns a ranch in New Mexico, where the high plains and sharp peaks would offer pleasant life to an expatriate horse, even one descended from the sturdy steeds that carried Genghis Khan and his successors across the steppes and the Gobi Desert to conquer most of Asia in the 13th century.
Whoa, indeed.
I don’t quite know what we’re supposed to make of this story — I think it’s meant to be a breezy political diary, but it comes off as an awkward attempt to romanticize Rumsfeld (not to mention those dusty plains or sharp peaks). I read it two or three times, scouring the article closely for signs of irony or sarcasm; I could find none.
Among the stylistic affronts, I spy a grammatical one: I believe that this article claims that Rumsfeld’s new horse is a hue. A rich latte hue, to be sure, with undernotes of dark-roast coffee, but a hue nonetheless.
Of course, we shouldn’t be too hard on the writer here — look at the quotes he had to work with:
“I am proud to be the owner of that proud animal.”
– Donald H. Rumsfeld
And I am ashamed to be governed by this shameful government.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Rick Bowmer/AP
Some will see these photographs as an exploitation of tragedy; others will see them as unduly macabre;
and some will recognize that only when we are willing to look at what our nation has wrought can it be saved, if it still can be saved.
Found via Talk Left and Pam’s House Blend, they are graphic and disturbing. Click on them at your own risk:
In an essay that appeared in an 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about Matthew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War dead — the first wartime photographs that brought the reality of war to American breakfast tables. Holmes wrote:
Many people would not look through this series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.
There are too many stories yet to be told. We need to hear them. We need to see them.
But even that is not enough.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur! –mon semblable,–mon frere!
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Clearly, the federal officials purportedly in charge of the disaster recovery efforts bear the heaviest burden for these deaths. The President who appointed them, and those who continue to support him, have revealed themselves for the callous, inhumane, immoral creatures that they are.
But I can’t help feeling that we are part of the problem, too. By continuing to participate in this corrupt and morally bankrupt society, we all bear some measure of the burden.
We live in a country whose President openly wonders “what didn’t go right?” as FEMA orders 25,000 body bags.
He will never know, because he will never face these dead.
But we can, and we must.
The last five posts I’ve written, and then deleted, have all been titled “What’s the Point?” In the face of our failed efforts to make a change before this disaster, I’m still trying to figure out the answer to that question, but the one thing I do know is that everything is different now. After Katrina, things cannot continue to go on as they did before. Something has to change. Everything has to change.
We need action. We need to open the doors of this cabinet of horrors, this grotesque nation of repulsive privilege and old bigotry.
This is one of the most strident, well-written, and insightful pieces of commentary I’ve seen on Hurricane Katrina. May our corporate media bless us with more journalists like Keith Olbermann, who have the guts to speak truth to power. (via Shakespeare’s Sister and Atrios)
The video is here (watch it!). The transcript is reproduced below, as Atrios says, for posterity:
SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”
Well there’s your problem right there.
If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.
The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.
But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”
Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the “I-Me” switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.
And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet’s meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural… and government-made.
But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.
No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, “we are not satisfied,” with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which “we” he thinks he’s speaking for on this point. Perhaps it’s the administration, although we still don’t know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, ‘I’ll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die’?
I don’t know which ‘we’ Mr. Bush meant.
For many of this country’s citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to ‘08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — “New Orleans.”
For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick “I’m not satisfied with my government’s response.” Instead of hiding behind phrases like “no one could have foreseen,” had he only remembered Winston Churchill’s quote from the 1930’s. “The responsibility,” of government, Churchill told the British Parliament “for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence.”
In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.
As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government’s credibility.
Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.
My favorite lines are the “sorry recital of self-absorption” and “It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.”
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