The Blame Game

Finally, the Bush administration thinks it's time for some accountability regarding the collossal failure that was the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. Or, as they like to put it, it's time to play -- The Blame Game.

President George W. Bush has named his homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, to lead an internal inquiry into the much-criticized federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the White House said on Tuesday.

A separate congressional inquiry will also investigate what went wrong with the federal response. But Bush so far has refused to back calls from Democrats for an independent commission to look at the disaster response.

Now that Bush has selected the finger, it's appropriate to start pointing it.

White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy told Reuters that "the president said he wanted to hold people accountable. This is one of the many ways in which he will do that." Let's be clear about what that means: Bush has assigned one of his advisers to assign blame in Katrinagate (to cringe and coin a term). Where she will assign that blame is Away From the President. Exactly where the blame lands is meaningless, as long as the president is "found" to be blameless. But where the blame will land is where the administration (which has been critical of others trying to play the blame game) has been dumping it ever since the shit hit the fan: on state and local officials. Here is what Townsend will conclude:

Federal disaster response to Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region was stymied by widespread unpreparedness and slow, inconsistent responses at the state and local levels. A tangle of state and local regulations made appropriate procedures unclear vis a vis requesting federal assistance, which body had jurisdiction and therefore the authority to request federal assistance, and whether federal assistance was even necessary. We therefore recommend that federal, state and local legislators design and implement a clear and concise strategy for disaster response to facilitate earlier intervention in future crises.

The language will vary some, but it'll be just as needlessly cluttered with excess syllables. And the meaning will be basically the same.

You don't really expect that one of Bush's advisers is going to conclude that it was funding cuts due to tax breaks for the rich and appointing unqualified cronies to key positions that led to this disaster and the shitty federal response, do you? You don't really think one of Bush's advisers is going to blame him, do you?