When they pull the rug out from under you, you tend to fall on your face. This is a lesson President Bush will hopefully learn the hard way tomorrow, when a group of House Republicans release what has been described as a "blistering" report on a wide range of government missteps in responding to Hurricane Katrina - especially the Bush Administration's failure to evacuate New Orleans with enough haste.
In preparing for what should be a clear condemnation - by Republicans, no less - of its bumbling of the Katrina response, the White House is now engaged in the shameful contortion of simultaneously placing blame and backpedaling.
Coming on the heels of the Administration's recent criticism of former FEMA chief Michael "Brownie" Brown for not providing timely enough reports on the situation in New Orleans - the same Brown who, lest we forget, Bush praised in the aftermath of Katrina as "doing a heck of a job" - Secretary Michael Chertoff finally admitted yesterday that his Department of Homeland Security's response to the disaster was "unacceptable."
Brown, on the other hand, claimed that he informed "senior White House officials," possibly even as senior as Chief of Staff Andrew Card, that New Orleans was flooding on the very day Katrina hit the city.
Bush and his cronies have maintained for months that they didn't receive word of the flooding until the next day, and that this delay in information accounted for their delay in taking action.
The facts, it seems, don't add up. So who should we believe? The unqualified hack who has proven, time and again, that he can't be trusted with any significant operational responsibility...or Michael Brown?
While no one is going to claim that Brown did even a passable job in his role as FEMA chief, he was, until last week, doing an excellent job as national scapegoat for the debacle that was the Katrina response. But we're learning over and over again, from independent reports and finally from Brown himself, that his responsibility for the government's failures was not as permeating as we've been led to believe. Rather, blame for Katrina should go straight to the top.
According to a draft of the Republican report that was leaked to the press, FEMA actually predicted the day before Katrina made landfall that a direct hit would flood most of New Orleans and that "at least 100,000 people in the city lack the transportation to get out of town."
Apparently, this wasn't enough incentive to evacuate the city at the time, so Bush sat on his hands until the situation was beyond dire.
At the heart of the controversy over who is to blame for the government's blundering of the Katrina response lies an issue of both high priorities and petty bureaucratic posturing. Brown alleged last week that FEMA had been put on the back burner within the Department of Homeland Security, and that it had been made a secondary priority to the department's more glamorous (and politically functional) counterterrorism activities.
In his remarks yesterday, Chertoff asserted that while Homeland Security failed to respond adequately to Katrina, it was not because too much of the department's resources were directed toward national security. The absurdity of this debate is that we shouldn't have to choose between disaster preparedness and national security; they are not mutually exclusive.
Part of ensuring our nation's security is being organized to respond to any kind of disaster - natural, terrorist or otherwise. The very existence of a conflict between national security and disaster readiness reflects a bureaucratic ineptitude that reaches all the way up to President Bush.
Let's review: The Bush Administration hesitated to evacuate New Orleans, and has lied about that fact ever since. Bush failed to run a tight enough ship within the Department of Homeland Security to provide adequate disaster relief, and now his underlings are playing the blame game.
Still, thousands of people are homeless and out of work in the Gulf region, even as Bush's budget proposes significant cuts to programs that support the poor. When the Congressional Republican report comes out tomorrow, the White House had better receive some serious comeuppance.
