John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, called the midterms “the end of the grand conservative experiment.”

Delusion on the left.

“There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’ ” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.”

Delusion on the right.

Apparently the big K was insufficiently shocking.

The pundit class must have secretly declared it a political third rail. There is too much blame to go around.

Bush's story is "trust us." We'll protect you from terrorists. You don't need to worry about laws and checks and balances and international opinions. We're the good guys. Make us powerful and we'll take care of it. Katrina broke that spell. People saw them clearly being incompetent and spinning it, and the trust went away.

But, if you were going to avoid Katrina you'd have had to start working on the new levy back in Clinton's time, or even earlier.

Decius wrote:

John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, called the midterms “the end of the grand conservative experiment.”

Delusion on the left.

“There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’ ” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.”

Delusion on the right.

Apparently the big K was insufficiently shocking.

The pundit class must have secretly declared it a political third rail. There is too much blame to go around.

Bush's story is "trust us." We'll protect you from terrorists. You don't need to worry about laws and checks and balances and international opinions. We're the good guys. Make us powerful and we'll take care of it. Katrina broke that spell. People saw them clearly being incompetent and spinning it, and the trust went away.

But, if you were going to avoid Katrina you'd have had to start working on the new levy back in Clinton's time, or even earlier.

The Katrina debacle wasn't about fixing the levees, it was about handling evacuations properly and failing that, getting emergency workers to the places they were needed immediately after. Watching people die, live on national television exposed the fact that for all the blathering these blivets have does about "National Security" the only security they were interested in was keeping their asses secure in their warm comfortable chairs.

EVERYONE knew about what would happen if the levees failed. The people in this administration just didn't care because the people that would get smacked don't generally vote, if they do vote they don't vote for them, and they don't give their money to them. That's true for basically any sort of emergency and why FEMA, which worked very well and very nimbly under Clinton, has turned into an utter debacle under Bush. They chopped the legs out of it because they don't give a damn about the people who would need the help, and it's not because as Kanye West said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

It's because George Bush doesn't care about about anyone but George Bush.

Mike the Usurper wrote:
The Katrina debacle wasn't about fixing the levees, it was about handling evacuations properly and failing that, getting emergency workers to the places they were needed immediately after.

I don't entirely agree. I think thats half the picture. With regard to confidence in this administration, its the whole picture. Clearly, as you said, they didn't respond competently. People are trusting them to handle terrorist attacks. They've asked for support in a war no one understands and for the unilateral ability to spy on people and imprison them. They got the people's support for those things, in 2004, because most people trusted them to do the right stuff. This event is a close analog to a terrorist attack. They failed to handle it well, and that broke the trust, which I think is the reason they lost in 2006. I think people are asking, if they can't be trusted with this, then can they be trusted with Iraq?

But, the Katrina story as a whole is bigger then that, and thats why I don't think anyone wants to talk about it. It doesn't work as a partisan issue, because Democratic leadership in Louisiana may have been as much a problem as the Bush administration. The right wing plays that up as an excuse, and its no excuse. The administration was clearly incompetent. One's incompetence is not excused by another's incompetence. And most of us don't vote in Louisiana.

More importantly; the fact is that this was an avoidable catasrophy. Even if the Administration had handled it beautifully it still would have been a problem, because we anticipated that this was going to happen and did not act decisively to stop it. Its an indictment of the whole system. No one cared about the people in the 9th ward. Everyone in the city knew the area was doomed. The people who lived there were poor. And everyone's attitude was that its stupid to live there and if they die it's their own damn problem. Thats a terrible attitude to have. And I think that any President, or Louisiana politician, who has sat in power for the past 30 years, and didn't move the ball forward on this, deserves a bit of the blame.

And I think everyone knows that. If the partisan blame game started back up on Katrina, everyone would loose. Its mutually assured destruction. So instead we're focused on other things.

I don't think the people trust the Democrats either. They're being given a chance to prove themselves. Its their game to loose now. But they have a real problem... the Republicans handed them a ticking bomb as they went out the door... We're probably not going to get Democracy in Iraq. It probably isn't possible. There is a good chance that we are going to get a massive increase in the violence there. And you can rest assured that regardless of what policy position the Democrats take on Iraq, Republicans will blame their policy for the problems we're going to see there. The buck just got passed.

So, those who've argued with conservatives for years that going into Iraq was a mistake can look forward to being blamed by conservatives when that prognosis turns out to be correct. It has already started.

Decius wrote:

And I think everyone knows that. If the partisan blame game started back up on Katrina, everyone would loose. Its mutually assured destruction. So instead we're focused on other things.

My position is, that would be a good thing. Expose the screw ups. Find what went so horribly wrong in the political system that a) created a situation where this could happen, and b) made the aftermath into such a god-awful nightmare.

Understanding a) isn't that hard. In general, people don't take the steps that preparedness asks for. Never have. Chicago has some of the strongest fire codes in the country after half the city burned to the ground 135 years ago, but they still don't work that well (the town hasn't burned down, but...). San Francisco has stong construction laws on trying to quake proof buildings, but as the Series quake proved, they weren't enough. New Orleans levee system was rated to handle a cat3, but failed because of some poor design and some cost cutting. The bottom line is that in the long run, preparedness is cheaper than recovery (see Clinton, Iowa in the flood of 1993, they were largely flood free but the areas that did not build a 500 year floor levee system like they had got creamed), but no one wants to go to that expense because there are other things that need doing now that have more immediate and tangible benefit.

Understanding b) is a hell of a lot harder, and fixing b) would go a long way towards dealing with a).

Thanks also for sourcing Powerline. Those oxygen thieves are the problem. It's always "us vs. them" over there which means they'll never produce anything of any value whatsoever. Assrocket and company would be doing the world a favor if they went for a long drive in a short garage.