Burying the dead

Hiding the cadavers, Terry Neal writes, won't make them go away. It seems even the Washington Post has had enough of the spin cycle that the administration seems to always be on.

The president's defenders have now perfected their public relations talking points: The public doesn't blame Bush. Any journalist, pundit or politician who criticizes the president is out of touch with the mainstream. Anyone who has the audacity to demand accountability is just a big old partisan meannie.

Making the rounds on the morning news shows, Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) a presumptive candidate for president in 2008, repeatedly made the point that "the buck stops at the federal government." In another breath, she insisted, "I'm not interested in pointing fingers; I'm interesting in getting answers."

Clinton is pushing legislation to remove FEMA from under the Department of Homeland Security. Whether this idea goes anywhere, is it not worth at least debating?

And if that's worth debating, why isn't it worth debating whether the administration has--particularly in the wake of 9/11 -- treated FEMA as a critically important agency.

In one of the few compliments Bush gave the previous administration during the 2000 campaign, he praised President Clinton's FEMA director, James Lee Witt as a "guy who has done a really good job of working with governors during times of crisis."

Yet after his election in 2000, Bush quickly replaced Witt with Joseph Allbaugh, his former campaign manager, and a man who had little experience in disaster relief. At a Senate subcommittee hearing on May 15, 2001, he called the agency "an oversized entitlement program" and warned that "expectations of when the federal government should be involved, and the degree of involvement, may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

If the person at the top doesn't demand answers and assign blame when necessary, how can he send the message to bureaucrats that they will be held responsible for their actions?

"Only 13 percent blame Bush?" blared a headline on the Drudge Report yesterday.

Other supporters focused on the 55 percent who said in a Washington Post/ABC poll that Bush should get only some (33 percent) or none of the blame (22 percent) for the response to Katrina.

But as is often the case, it's not that simple.

Drudge refers to a new CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll. And sure enough, there is one question that asks, "who do you think is most responsible for the problems in New Orleans after the hurricane." Indeed, 13 percent answered Bush. (Another 18 percent answered "federal agencies" -- which the last time I checked, answer to Bush).

But in the same poll, people were asked a separate question -- judge how the president did in responding to the hurricane. And 42 percent said "bad" or "terrible" compared to 35 percent who said "great" or "good."

The boosterism also ignores anything else in the polls that doesn't fit public relations talking points, including the fact that majorities of people believe (according to the Washington Post/ABC poll) that the Bush administration does not have a clear plan for dealing with the post-Katrina situation, and that majorities of people believe Katrina has exposed major problems with the federal government's emergency preparedness.

FEMA is apparently attempting to keep reporters away from New Orleans -- the sight of a domestic, natural disaster. Think about it, writes Josh Marshall,

...these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn't get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what's happening in the city.

This, from NBC's Brian Williams:

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

I guess things are looking up for the Cheney/Rumsfeld administration. They are able to dismantle the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (ironically intended to keep troops out of the South following Reconstruction) while at the same time applying a tourniquet to the free flow of reporting from the scene.

We are not to criticize. We are not to see. We are to forget. God bless America.