Bush supporters' aftermath thread

[..] there is a darker possibility. The Karl Rove team is gradually getting Republicans back ''on message." The message: There's no point in playing a ''blame game," as Scott McClellan said 15 times at Thursday's press briefing. The New Orleans disaster just proves the unreliability of government in general rather than this feckless president in particular. We should be looking forward to rebuilding -- with the private sector taking the lead.

If we aren't alert, Bush will not only wriggle out of political responsibility for diverting funds from New Orleans's flood defenses, eviscerating FEMA, and bungling the response, just as he evaded responsibility after Richard Clarke's testimony that the administration ignored warnings about Al Qaeda's plans for a 9/11 style-attack. Katrina could even be a political windfall, promoting the campaign to cripple government, permanently displacing some reliable Democratic voters from the swing state of Louisiana [..].

THE PRESIDENT: No, what I was referring to is this. When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that's what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.

On Sunday, Sept. 4, Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain President Bush's statement that the government couldn't have anticipated breaches in levees in New Orleans.

Mr. Chertoff talked about news coverage. "Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet,' " he said. "Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse. It was on Tuesday that the levee -- may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday -- that the levee started to break."

And now, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, the Bush administration is "importing" into the Katrina recovery efforts "many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq." The Journal says that the first large Katrina-recovery contracts have been awarded without competitive bidding and using "so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend." The problem with such contracts? They encourage waste because they provide no incentive for the contractors to control costs, the Journal says.

If it all sounds familiar, that's because it is. "You can easily compare FEMA's internal resources to what you saw in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq: a small, underfunded organization taking on a Herculean task under tremendous time pressure," Steven Schooner, a contracting expert at George Washington University, tells the Journal. "That is almost by definition a recipe for disaster."

A lawyer with the Texas secretary of state was fired after she spoke to a reporter about presidential adviser Karl Rove's eligibility to vote in the state.

Elizabeth Reyes, 30, said she was dismissed last week for violating the agency's media policy after she was quoted in a Sept. 3 story by The Washington Post about tax deductions on Rove's homes in Washington and Texas.

Firms with Bush-Cheney ties clinching Katrina deals

McTag wrote:

Lash wrote:

They neither deserve, nor will they recieve, courtesy on this point under any circumstances again. I will consider any requests in that vein by them as a personal invitation from now on.

They have obliterated personal courtesies.

I nearly choked, when I read Lash writing about extending personal courtesies.

What's it to be, Lash, No More Ms Nice Person?

While that is funny--when asked, I have always --to this point-- taken requests by thread starters seriously. I have left a thread when asked by a thread starter; and when the Democrats asked me and my ilk (haven't used ilk in three days) to give them space after they lost the election, I did so immediately.

So, did the ilk.

Yet, it has been apparent that we are the only ones to take such courtesies seriously.

I was just giving public notice that I shall in the future, behave as they do on this matter. Hate to lose that last semblance of propriety, but when in Crete...

You know, mock the cretins...

NYT's Brooks revealed that "from Day One," the Bush White House "decided our public relations is not going to be honest" -- why hasn't he written about this?


On the September 11 edition of NBC's syndicated The Chris Matthews Show, New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed that he has learned from private conversations with Bush officials who "represent" what "Bush believes" that from its earliest days, the Bush administration adopted a policy of shielding itself from political damage by never publicly admitting any mistake -- even if it meant lying to the media and the American public. The fact that Bush doesn't admit mistakes has been reported by the media for years. For instance, in the September 11 edition of The New York Times, David Sanger reported, "Mr. Bush, his aides acknowledge, is loath to fire members of his administration or to take public actions that are tantamount to an admission of a major mistake." Brooks himself has previously noted the Bush administration's unwillingness to admit to mistakes. But what Brooks's September 11 account adds is that Bush is being intentionally dishonest -- in Brooks's words, "totally tactical and totally insincere" -- in resisting such public admissions and in blaming others when failures are too obvious to deny.

Moreover, on the Matthews Show, Brooks disclosed that "from Day One," the Bush White House "decided our public relations is not going to be honest," and that "privately they admit mistakes all the time." Brooks's revelation would appear to be of major significance, particularly in light of recent attempts by Bush administration officials to shift culpability in the Hurricane Katrina disaster away from the White House. But while he claimed on the Matthews show to have debated this strategy with administration officials "since Day One" -- indicating that he has known about it from the beginning -- a review of his columns and television appearances since Katrina struck reveals that Brooks has refrained from telling viewers and readers that the administration's campaign to rehabilitate its public image over the poor handling of the Katrina crisis by blaming others was apparently another manifestation of this dishonest strategy.