Blame Bush

It's hardly surprising that Max Boot, a gifted writer and self-described member of the "Amalgamated Federation of Pollsters, Pundits, Politicians and Pompous Pontificators," is one of the journalists waiting in line for the guillotine-Democratic flack Paul Begala is today's Madame Defarge-for suggesting in a Sept. 7 L.A. Times op-ed that the immediate rush to identify villains in the aftermath of Katrina is premature. Boot, a conservative, had the audacity to write that while rescue efforts were ongoing in Louisiana and Mississippi, it's counter-productive to blast the Bush Administration and the local officials in the those states, from a cozy and dry sofa.

That's heresy to every liberal pundit (nearly all of them, that is) who took the disaster as an opportunity to again blame Bush for the Iraq war, the alleged Hooverville economy (though the national unemployment rate now stands at 4.9 percent) and tax cuts. I don't really think that men and women like E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Thomas Oliphant were pleased to see the horrific devastation in the Gulf-as opposed to Nation-like wackos who are rooting for civil war in Iraq and a high body count in New Orleans to promote a scripted agenda, forgetting once again that Bush is no longer running for president-but they're teetering close to the edge, so rabid is their hatred for the Republican-controlled government.

Bush has zero margin for error with the elite media, which is why it was inexplicable that his public response to the natural disaster was so lethargic and garbled, reinforcing every stereotype that his enemies have tarred him with since he became a presidential candidate six years ago. I believe that historians will judge him to have been a visionary chief executive, but his communications squad is the worst in recent memory. One hopes that Bush's mother Barbara, who said that the "underprivileged" evacuees from New Orleans would do fine in Houston, now has a muzzle on her Ralph Kramden-like big mouth.

Bill Clinton-who largely ignored the '93 World Trade Center terrorist strike, and was MIA during a '95 heat wave that killed almost 1000 people in the Chicago region-would've given a televised address to the nation within 24 hours of the storm's impact, probably from New Orleans, and he'd have worked the crowd there on the ground instead of viewing the floods from a helicopter. And while the media wasn't entirely in the tank for Clinton, he would've been hailed as an empathetic, hands-on president.

Nevertheless, despite the immediate damage Bush has caused his party-and it's the luck of a talented politician that Katrina occurred a year before crucial midterm elections-the bum rap he's taken, while deserved, has more to do with public relations than actual policy screw-ups.

Boot wrote: "At this point, we simply don't know what it all means and who, if anyone, is to blame. Many of the attempts to assign blame have already been revealed as farcically unconvincing. The argument, for instance, that Katrina is the offspring of global warming ignores meteorological records that show that the number of hurricanes has been cycling up and down for decades. An even more incendiary charge-that the response was dilatory because so many victims were African Americans-is presented with even less evidence, which is to say, none at all. No doubt other nuggets of insta-analysis will also be debunked in the days ahead, while future investigations will reveal problems than no one knew existed."

Just three days after Boot's column was published, it was reported in major newspapers that the death toll in New Orleans was likely to fall far short of Mayor Ray Nagin's hysterical prediction of 10,000. That may be small comfort to the many thousands of residents who were displaced and lost all their possessions, not to mention the families of those who did perish, but it is an indictment of the media that reported Nagin's speculation as an almost incontrovertible fact.

You'd think that journalists, who generally aren't afflicted with memory loss (Helen Thomas and Dowd aside), would recall that in the week after 9/11 there were wildly inflated casualty counts before the results months later showed an awful, but far lower, toll of approximately three thousand.

As the immediate crisis slowly recedes, the uglier side of American political and cultural life-as opposed to the vast amount of money contributed by wealthy athletes, entertainers, companies like Wal-Mart and less affluent citizens alike-is starting to show. I was in a Baltimore County Barnes & Noble last Saturday and upon entering the music and DVD section was struck by the store's upfront display. There were piles of books about New Orleans, movies such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Big Easy and Runaway Jury, and jazz CDs prominently featured, which is insensitive enough, but there wasn't so much as a Red Cross or Salvation Army jar to be found.

DNC chairman Howard Dean, ever eager to justify his shaky, bombastic tenure as the nominal head of his party, agreed with high-living charlatans Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Kanye West and Al Sharpton that Bush's abysmal reaction to the hurricane was racially motivated, a ludicrous charge that makes clear why the Democrats have to chuck their extreme left-wing activists if they expect to make any progress in the '06 and '08 elections.

An enormous step in the right direction would be for millionaire presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards to follow Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling's lead and foot the bill for a stricken family to stay in a hotel for a year. Schilling doesn't count, though, since he's a Republican and born-again Christian.