You ignored Blanco. That was whom I was mainly placing the blame on. Blanco is the governor of a state in the Gulf of America (f/k/a Mexico) - in hurricane alley. Hurricane preparedness and response is one of the MAIN duties of a governor in that region. All you have to do is compare her lack of action to Haley Barber in Mississippi or DeSantis (or Crist to be bipartisan) in Florida. Yes, NO presented unique challenges but those challenges were well known to the State prior to Katrina.
1. If you were mainly placing the blame on Blanco, why didn't you say so? Are we supposed to read your mind?
2. Blanco's issues were in the preparedness. Preparedness is typically addressed in after-the-fact analyses, and indeed after a few months, both conventional wisdom and popular opinion held the city, the state and the feds responsible. Look up the polling well after the crisis resolution.
3. If you think sins in preparedness are going to attract as much attention as sins of response, you must not be paying much attention to politics. It's always like that, mostly because the vast majority of people aren't paying attention before the crisis. Until New Orleans flooded, it was just another hurricane. And nobody can assess preparedness on their own, so the talking heads start spinning and people don't know what to believe -- except they see on the TVs a great American city looking like a Third World nation.
I mean, this is almost always YOUR argument in favor of MAGA. Do you believe the official employment numbers in 2024, or do you believe your own eyes? The difference is that MAGA finds a way to cause people to distrust both the stats and their own experience, in favor of Fox News propaganda.
4. As I said before, events don't occur in a vacuum. Katrina hit when the war in Iraq was at its low point. We were obviously not winning; thousands of soldiers were dying or getting seriously injured; it was costing a fortune; and it became clear that the whole WMD thing was bullshit from the beginning. And yet Bush and Rummy were carrying on as if they didn't fucking care. Remember "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want"? "Unknown Unknowns"? They were running an incompetent operation abroad, and everyone knew it.
So then when people saw an analogous clusterfuck, and then heard Bush say "you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie," it reminded too clearly of all the times Bush disingenuously heaped praise on Rumsfeld. As if the priority was not hurting Rummy or Brownie's feelings, with the welfare of the American people coming in a distant second.
Politically speaking, it was a Bush WH fuckup and it couldn't have happened without all the other fuckups.
5. I've given Bush credit and I will again for his post-Katrina humility. I really have the sense that it was a watershed moment for him, when he realized that his staff was treating him like a fool and manipulating his reality. And so he stopped trusting anyone. Rumsfeld was fired in 06, and Bush became less chummy with Cheney. Cheney was pissed that Bush wouldn't commute Libby's sentence; I think Bush refused mostly as a middle finger to the VP.
So in retrospect, it was because of Katrina that we could see Bush more clearly as a good person. A terrible, terrible president, but not the monster like some members of his administration. This is also why, in my view, he has stayed away from the public view basically forever. I think he was deeply ashamed of his performance, deeply ashamed that he had let himself be walked around on a leash he couldn't see. Which doesn't really alleviate his many sins, but it shows them to have been more incompetence than malice.
