dajafi wrote:From electoral-vote.com:

There is little doubt that if this storm had occurred during the DNC, many Republican-oriented preachers would be saying this is God's way of punishing the Democrats for their evil views on abortion and homosexuality. Such statements are not likely to be heard much this week.

Or, I dunno, it's something that's much more likely to happen when you wait until the end of the summer--the dead middle of hurricane season--to have a convention...

I'll say it. It's pretty clear God is demonstrating his wrath on the Republican Party. I don't see any other way to interpret it.

Palin's voice irks me.

TenuredVulture wrote: It's pretty clear God is demonstrating his wrath on the Republican Party. I don't see any other way to interpret it.

God obviously likes Republicans, that's why he's providing an excuse for Bush and Chaney to stay away from the convention.

ashton wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote: It's pretty clear God is demonstrating his wrath on the Republican Party. I don't see any other way to interpret it.

God obviously likes Republicans, that's why he's giving Bush and Chaney an excuse to stay away from the convention.

I think that is small consolation. Remember, the Katrina disaster is really what destroyed the Bush Presidency. Many have forgotten, but now they'll remember. In the context of a campaign, the Katrina failures can be tied to security (so, we've got this Homeland Security department that has done nothing but fail since its inception--are we any safer than we were 8 years ago?) as a domestic issue, McCain's weakness.

As a Chicago politician, Obama presumably knows how important responding to natural events is.

Another thing that can easily be pointed out is that the national guard unit in South Arkansas (39th Infantry Brigade), one that is well positioned to provide assistance to the gulf coast can't do so this time around, as it happens to be in Iraq.

Katrina killed the Bush presidency?

That perspective seems only possible if you're looking out from the inside left... or a PTK style paranoid.

VoxOrion wrote:Katrina killed the Bush presidency?

That perspective seems only possible if you're looking out from the inside left... or a PTK style paranoid.

By killed the Bush presidency, Katrina marked the beginning of major approval rating declines, from which Bush would never recover. It was at least part of the reason why the Dems scored a big victory in Nov. 2006, and it probably had something to do with those surprising Republican losses in special elections in gulf states last year.

Remember, Bush had won his reelection bid less than a year before Katrina, and won, in retrospect, fairly comfortably.

VoxOrion wrote:Katrina killed the Bush presidency?

That perspective seems only possible if you're looking out from the inside left... or a PTK style paranoid.

Maybe I'm also paranoid and/or "inside left" (?), but I think he just means in terms of political viability. What the government response to Katrina showed, as nothing else to that point had, was that the consequences of appointing hacks, cronies, and ideological fellow-travelers to potentially important positions sometimes could be legitimately life-and-death.

"Brownie" caught the public (and press) imagination the way that, say, the DHHS staff member who lied to Congress about the true budgetary cost of Medicare Part D did not. When the basic presumption of competence in the everyday work of governance was gone, everything else we've seen in the last three years since looked different.

dajafi wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:Katrina killed the Bush presidency?

That perspective seems only possible if you're looking out from the inside left... or a PTK style paranoid.

Maybe I'm also paranoid and/or "inside left" (?), but I think he just means in terms of political viability. What the government response to Katrina showed, as nothing else to that point had, was that the consequences of appointing hacks, cronies, and ideological fellow-travelers to potentially important positions sometimes could be legitimately life-and-death.

"Brownie" caught the public (and press) imagination the way that, say, the DHHS staff member who lied to Congress about the true budgetary cost of Medicare Part D did not. When the basic presumption of competence in the everyday work of governance was gone, everything else we've seen in the last three years since looked different.

Funny thing is, based on what I know about the federal response to Katrina, Brownie was as much a fall guy as anything. The real blame, at the federal level, lies with Michael Chertoff, who, by the way is still there. Of course, Nagin didn't exactly cover himself in glory and he's still there as well. Brinkley's book After the Deluge (a great book by the way) blames Nagin for the pre-hurricane failure to have a reasonable evacuation plan in place, and Chertoff for botching the recover.

Oh, and those FEMA trailers? Still covering acres and acres of land at Hope Airport in Hope Arkansas. Maybe they'll use them this time.

I don't know - Katrina was a big-time-real-deal disaster and the coverage by the media and reaction by the talking heads still managed to be outright hysterical - a hysteria that seems to have successfully flung things from "this is serious" to "I can't take this seriously".

It just seems weird to me to see two folks describe the "beginning of the end" for Bush completely ignore the two greatest and IIRC well reported reasons for his descent: the war and the economy.

The "facination" (I don't mean that as morbid or whatever) with the Katrina aftermath seems to be a product of the left - much the same way a righty in the 90's would have told you how important Vince Foster or Whitewater were.

VoxOrion wrote:I don't know - Katrina was a big-time-real-deal disaster and the coverage by the media and reaction by the talking heads still managed to be outright hysterical - a hysteria that seems to have successfully flung things from "this is serious" to "I can't take this seriously".

It just seems weird to me to see two folks describe the "beginning of the end" for Bush completely ignore the two greatest and IIRC well reported reasons for his descent: the war and the economy.

But the war did not cost him any votes in his bid for re-election, and in 2006, the economy was still humming along.

VoxOrion wrote:I don't know - Katrina was a big-time-real-deal disaster and the coverage by the media and reaction by the talking heads still managed to be outright hysterical - a hysteria that seems to have successfully flung things from "this is serious" to "I can't take this seriously".

It just seems weird to me to see two folks describe the "beginning of the end" for Bush completely ignore the two greatest and IIRC well reported reasons for his descent: the war and the economy.

The "facination" (I don't mean that as morbid or whatever) with the Katrina aftermath seems to be a product of the left - much the same way a righty in the 90's would have told you how important Vince Foster or Whitewater were.

you really cant be serious.

I am. There's a whole world of thinking out there that isn't reflected on the Daily Show.

99 problems but a Katrina ain't one

You're equating an "obsession" with the mismanagement of a huge natural disaster to that of Whitewater or the Vince Foster thing?

I don't watch the Daily Show, and never really have. I don't know that that means. But your view of the world, or at least the one you post here to get a rise out of people, is downright scary.

VoxOrion wrote:I don't know - Katrina was a big-time-real-deal disaster and the coverage by the media and reaction by the talking heads still managed to be outright hysterical - a hysteria that seems to have successfully flung things from "this is serious" to "I can't take this seriously".

It just seems weird to me to see two folks describe the "beginning of the end" for Bush completely ignore the two greatest and IIRC well reported reasons for his descent: the war and the economy.

The "facination" (I don't mean that as morbid or whatever) with the Katrina aftermath seems to be a product of the left - much the same way a righty in the 90's would have told you how important Vince Foster or Whitewater were.

That's just nuts. Katrina was real--have you been to New Orleans recently? I know talk radio idiots like to pretend nothing happened in New Orleans, but the death toll was roughly the same as 9/11, and the disaster was largely man-made--levee failures, no evacuation plan, and a retarded rescue operation. Katrina was a blow to an American city, from which it has yet to recover. Depending on how this current storm goes, we very well may lose an entire city.

Now this isn't primarily Bush's fault, but to minimize the disaster as a left wing thing is to live in an alternate reality as much as PTK does.

VoxOrion wrote:It just seems weird to me to see two folks describe the "beginning of the end" for Bush completely ignore the two greatest and IIRC well reported reasons for his descent: the war and the economy.

I think it was more like "the end of the end," again in terms of political viability. Bush wasn't the first president to mismanage a war or see the economy falter on his watch. He was the first one, at least in the media age, to both mismanage and seem (I'm not saying he was) so unaware of or indifferent to, a disaster like that.

VoxOrion wrote:The "facination" (I don't mean that as morbid or whatever) with the Katrina aftermath seems to be a product of the left - much the same way a righty in the 90's would have told you how important Vince Foster or Whitewater were.

Maybe I don't understand this statement. I kind of hope not, actually.

TenuredVulture wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:I don't know - Katrina was a big-time-real-deal disaster and the coverage by the media and reaction by the talking heads still managed to be outright hysterical - a hysteria that seems to have successfully flung things from "this is serious" to "I can't take this seriously".

It just seems weird to me to see two folks describe the "beginning of the end" for Bush completely ignore the two greatest and IIRC well reported reasons for his descent: the war and the economy.

The "facination" (I don't mean that as morbid or whatever) with the Katrina aftermath seems to be a product of the left - much the same way a righty in the 90's would have told you how important Vince Foster or Whitewater were.

That's just nuts. Katrina was real--have you been to New Orleans recently? I know talk radio idiots like to pretend nothing happened in New Orleans, but the death toll was roughly the same as 9/11, and the disaster was largely man-made--levee failures, no evacuation plan, and a retarded rescue operation. Katrina was a blow to an American city, from which it has yet to recover. Depending on how this current storm goes, we very well may lose an entire city.

Now this isn't primarily Bush's fault, but to minimize the disaster as a left wing thing is to live in an alternate reality as much as PTK does.

brought it upon themselves!!!! stole beerz!!!!

vox that sounds like something i would say to get a rise out of people.

you have to add a joke in there somewhere though.

I'm not minimizing the disaster. I worked very closely with folks who were cleared out from New Orleans and moved to Philly for months after - aside from maybe TV, I'm certain I've had more exposure to actual Katrina victims than any of you. These were people that had to go home to bury members of their family, despite being middle-class folks who maintained employment because they worked for a government agency (and worked 12-16 hour days for months at a time).

I'm talking about the facination with the event as a watershed moment in American politics. I'm talking about the outrageous stories and conspiracies (that I heard straight from horses mouths) about what "really happened" in New Orleans. I'm talking about stories about cannibalism, rape gangs, black ops explosions heard near levees - the entire nine yards. The folks from NO had a more nuianced view, the same individual would spout about the morons who wouldn't leave and are pissing away the money while claiming a friend of a friend heard the explosions.

The mismanagement of the disaster, the dire implications derived from it, and the targeting of blame is something that is a part of the Bush legacy that is much more important to his enemies than to regular Joe. I can't believe a poll of 3000 Americans would reveal Katrina as the "end of the end" for Bush. War, economy, then probably corruption would be third, and that's assuming not catching bin Laden wasn't a separate item from the war.

All kidding aside, you guys are talking about the prospect of a disaster during the RNC with glee - a theme all over the web today from Michael Moore to Howard Dean.

VoxOrion wrote:I'm talking about the facination with the event as a watershed moment in American politics. I'm talking about the outrageous stories and conspiracies (that I heard straight from horses mouths) about what "really happened" in New Orleans. I'm talking about stories about cannibalism, rape gangs, black ops explosions heard near levees - the entire nine yards. The folks from NO had a more nuianced view, the same individual would spout about the morons who wouldn't leave and are pissing away the money while claiming a friend of a friend heard the explosions.

I must have missed the part where any of us advanced any of these "stories." Believe it or not, there isn't a Left Hive Mind; a lot of us actually think that, say, you make vastly more sense than, say, PtK, at least most of the time.

As with the government's response to 9/11, I think the quotidian details of the government's incompetence are more than sufficiently damning.