Joe Conason sees a pattern too

Conason, in Salon:

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good Morning America."

That statement was wholly untrue, as Sidney Blumenthal noted on Wednesday in Salon -- and as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., the former chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency all tried to warn in recent years. Cutbacks in funding for flood control and emergency preparedness by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress over the past several years probably made a terrible event much worse.

The president's defenders can tolerate no discussion of those realities, however, because they have no plausible answers. Instead they urge us all to keep quiet or be accused of undermining America.

Does this all sound strangely familiar, like a nightmarish flashback?

A repetitive pattern is emerging whenever a terrible event occurs that is due at least partly to governmental incompetence. The president and other high officials offer deceptive utterances to excuse themselves. And reinforcing their self-serving statements is a chorus of admonishments from the right against any dissent or criticism.

After 9/11, the White House falsely claimed that there had been no warnings and that the Bush administration had been preparing for an attack by al-Qaida since its earliest days in office. Anyone who said otherwise -- or who merely wanted to investigate the underlying weaknesses that had enabled the attackers -- was a "partisan" seeking to "undermine the war on terror."

There was also, we should recall, much chatter back in those dark times about the wonderful unity and generosity of the nation. That is true now and was true then, as far as it went. Unfortunately, the "united we stand" spirit didn't survive the moment when, several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush advisor Karl Rove boasted to his fellow Republicans about his plan to use the war on terror to win the 2002 midterm elections.

The pattern continued with the invasion of Iraq, which has become a disastrous misadventure owing to the poor planning, inept management and mendacious propaganda of the White House. To examine the errors and lies that have landed our troops in quicksand and drained away hundreds of billions of dollars is to provide aid and comfort to America's enemies -- or so we have been warned, especially since the president's popularity ratings have been in free fall.

And now we are told that only bad people dare to criticize their bad government.

So we are not to mention the downgrading of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a Cabinet-level agency to a neglected sideline of the Department of Homeland Security. We must not say that FEMA was turned away from its mission when the president replaced its superb director, James Lee Witt, with political cronies who knew nothing about disaster planning. We cannot talk about the consistent underfunding of the Army Corps of Engineers, whose efforts to rebuild the Louisiana levees practically halted because of budget cuts last year. Above all, we must never, ever ask whether global warming might be making the annual perils of tropical weather systems much, much worse.

None of this is to say that the hurricane is "Bush's fault," which would obviously be unfair. But as with 9/11 and Iraq, the president and his administration deserve to be held accountable for poor judgment, damaging decisions and false statements.

Despite the hyperventilating and hysteria on the right against those of us who dare criticize their chosen Messiah, THEY are the ones who ascribe divine characteristics to George W. Bush, not those of us who question him. We know full well that he doesn't create hurricanes, nor do we believe that Hurricane Katrina is God's punishment against New Orleans for abortion clinics, mixed marriages, drag parades at Mardi Gras, or any other sexual sin that obsesses the right.

It MAY, however, be Nature's shot across the bow against a population that has badly stewarded the planet we live on -- Nature's revenge against us for voting largely Republican for the last 30 years, as Mr. Brilliant so succinctly put it over morning coffee today.

Again, it's a gross oversimplification, of course, but certainly Republican policies of overdevelopment, overdependence on ozone layer-destroying fossil fuels, refusal to fund alternative energy research, refusal to impose emissions standards with any teeth, refusal to fund FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, refusal to impose fuel economy standards, refusal to educate the public about the very real dangers of global warming, etc., etc., ad infinitum have helped to create a climate (literally speaking) in which the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico is a ridiculous 90 degrees -- an all-you-can-eat buffet for tropical storms.

And it's not just a question of blaming Republican leaders, because Americans have bought the "You can have everything you want and it's all free" mindset that started with Reagan. The House and Senate are 535 people. Add in everyone in the Admnistration and support positions, and you're talking a few thousand people. Even if every last one of them drove a Hummer, they wouldn't bear sole responsibility.

Yes, Bush has shown an appalling callousness and lack of leadership in the aftermath of this tragedy, just as he did right on 9/11, when he sat in a classroom reading while Americans died, and then fled the other way as fast as he could. Because the Delta flood can't be addressed with sending a bunch of American kids to kill people, he hasn't a clue what to do. And his handlers bet that Americans wouldn't care about a bunch of black people.

They bet wrong.

But at the same time as we're pointing the finger at the Bush Administration, it's time for Americans to do some soul searching about the kind of world we want to live in, and how we can get there. I live in a town in which almost everyone has at least one SUV -- and 90% of the time, when you see people driving them, they are alone. There is absolutely no reason for this. Americans have come to regard driving huge vehicles as some kind of God-given right. (We in the Brilliant household have a Corolla and a Civic -- and Mr. Brilliant is six feet tall, so don't tell me tall people need them.) We regard having a cavernous McMansion with 16-foot ceilings as a God-given right, no matter how much fuel it burns to heat it.

The bottom line is that resources are finite, and what we use has a larger impact than just what it costs us as individuals. We have two choices: We can either put American resources into conserving what we use now and put REAL money into research into viable alternatives, or we are all going to end up living in New Orleans. Closing our eyes, screaming at the kid gas jockey down the street, and pretending that there's no problem, is not a solution.

Neither is saying that only bad people criticize the government.