HURRICANE SPIN
The New York Times is nothing if not reflexively leftist. It's trotting out a new anti-Bush line, made up out of thin air, to breathe a little new life into the left's latest media jihad against the Bush administration.
And yes, jihad is a perfectly fair description of what's going on. They're waging a war based on their religious zeal. Its aim is to destroy the Bush presidency. It's based in part on conspiracy theories, in part on rumors, and in part on a willed misunderstanding of our federal system. It's a jihad.
Today the Times has former FEMA Director Michael Brown's take on the Katrina aftermath. Brown is of the opinion that the problems encountered in NOLA had everything to do with the incompetence of the local officials, city and state:
Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation.
"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official - either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin - in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."
By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a handbasket" in Louisiana. A day later, Mr. Brown said, he asked the White House to take over the response effort.
He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré of the Army as the Pentagon's commander of active-duty forces began to turn the situation around.
Note that Brown is placing responsibility at the state and local level in the second graph. The Times follows the above with this:
In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director on Monday under intense criticism, Mr. Brown declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response.
It's reasonable to assume that Brown declined to blame the White House because the Times tried to get him to do just that. Anyway--
The Times tale recounts a series of details showing that the state and local storm response was a mess:
By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early on Sunday, Mr. Brown said he grew so frustrated with the failure of local authorities to make the evacuation mandatory that he asked Mr. Bush for help."Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?" Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.
"Mike, you want me to call the mayor?" the president responded in surprise, Mr. Brown said. Moments later, apparently on his own, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, held a news conference to announce a mandatory evacuation, but it was too late, Mr. Brown said. Plans said it would take at least 72 hours to get everyone out.
When he arrived in Baton Rouge on Sunday evening, Mr. Brown said, he was concerned about the lack of coordinated response from Governor Blanco and Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau, the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard.
"What do you need? Help me help you," Mr. Brown said he asked them. "The response was like, 'Let us find out,' and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing."
Granted, this is Brown's view of things, but it lines up well with the details that have been emerging over the past couple of weeks now. Blanco needed 24 hours to make simple decisions, she kept relief organizations out of the city, and Nagin seems to have decided to wing it once disaster struck. So how does the Times choose to handle this? If you guessed "blame Bush," you win:
Mr. Brown's version of events raises questions about whether the White House and Mr. Chertoff acted aggressively enough in the response. New Orleans convulsed in looting and violence after the hurricane, and troops did not arrive in force to restore order until five days later.
That's one very narrow response to Brown's take. A broader and more accurate reading would be that the local officials were inept, were incapable of giving Brown even the most basic logistical support or itemized lists of things they needed (which is their job), and finger-pointed after the fact when it became clear that their own disaster plans fell far short of the mark, and that for the most part the local officials didn't even follow what plans they did have.
But this spin is going to emerge as the new left line. Bush will be cast as having failed because those "below him" failed, even though those who failed aren't part of the administration and are not his subordinates. They're an elected executive of a sovereign state and of a large city, respectively--they don't answer to Bush because that's how our system works. It's funny how the left has been calling Bush a dictator for years, yet are now slamming him for failing to act like a dictator and push the entire Constitution aside.
But that won't matter to the left. They don't get federalism, or if they do they conveniently forget it at times like these. That's the willed misunderstanding. We've seen it emerge in comments on a couple of posts on this blog, and soon enough it will probably be the dominant left line on the storm. It's quite convenient, since it allows for Nagin and Blanco to assume responsibility for their failures, as they have done, while maintaining an angle to attack Bush and cast the local failures on him.
Who cares about a little thing like the Constitution when there's an opportunity to blame Bush?
(via Right Wing News, who has more to say on the subject)
MORE: Different takes from Rick Moran and Michelle Malkin. I wrote this post more as an examination of the Times' spin angle than of Brown's defense, which I agree betrays more than a few weaknesses in his performance, mostly because I've seen the spin in this article show up here where I've had to combat it directly. And I do expect it to become the left's next line of attack, its other lines having failed so far.
But I will take some issue with this comment:
"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official - either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin - in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."Establishing that command was his job. FEMA's role, after all, is to coordinate disaster relief efforts. The agency has few resources of its own because it's supposed to provide what amounts to supervisory oversight. Brown simply lacked the leadership to do that. Perhaps it was his lack of experience, or perhaps it was his personality, but Brown clearly was ill-suited for his job.
Coordination and command are not the same thing. FEMA doesn't promise to arrive on the scene of a disaster for 72-96 hours. Are the local officials just supposed to sit on their hands until FEMA arrives, even if it takes four days?
No, they're not. When FEMA arrives, it is supposed to help the local/state disaster corps get what they need from the federal government and from states unaffected by the disaster. States are sovereign entities, and disasters don't change that fact. It was not as far as I can tell Brown's job to establish the unified command. It was NOLA authorities' and Louisiana authorities' job to establish command and then tell FEMA what they needed, where and when. They are supposed to have a greater understanding of the peculiar needs of their locales than the feds. Brown was supposed to augment the command by connecting it to the federal disaster relief capabilities. I don't think he did a good job of that, but I also don't think it's fair to lay the entire command failure at his feet. The city melted down very much on its own as FEMA was on its way to help. Blanco was feeding both the feds and Nagin several lines of grade A bull throughout the crisis, always with an eye to her own political standing and her lawyers' opinions. How was Brown supposed to establish a unified command when Blanco kept standing in the way of anyone doing just that?
It's clear by now that Brown's leadership skills are wanting, to say the least. But I think it's become common to misunderstand exactly what FEMA is and isn't supposed to do in a crisis. It doesn't push aside state and local governments and relieve them of their responsibilities. And before Katrina, FEMA hadn't had to deal with an evaporating local and state government that was actively encouraging lawlessness. I'm sure it will add that possibility into its future planning and training scenarios.