Maureen Dowd tries to kick George Bush in the shins with her most recent column but just winds up looking foolish, petty, and dishonest instead. Her column can be read here. Like much of her work, it's short on facts and long on baseless invective. Let's consider her more serious allegations in the order she makes them.
She alleges that money that could have gone to shoring up the levees around New Orleans has been squandered in Iraq:
The implication, of course, is that there were not enough National Guard troops at home to do the job of securing the city. This is, however, completely false. James Robbins sets forth the truth of the matter at National Review Online.
She goes on to imply that the Bush administration is culpable for the deaths of New Orleanians because they cut the Corps of Engineers budget request last year:
Aside from the delightful irony of seeing lefties like Ms Dowd harrumphing that the Corps of Engineers, a governmental entity absolutely loathed by the Left, did not get the funding it requested, there is another problem here. Let's suppose the Corps had received everything it asked for. Would the money have been spent on levees or on marshland reclamation? If it would have been spent on the levees would they have been upgraded by the time Katrina hit? Would the money have made any real difference by this date? If not, why mention it? Until we know the answers to these questions Dowd's complaint is meaningless.
She goes on to express amazement that Bush doesn't start metaphorically executing people willy-nilly in the wake of the calamity:
So far from being a flaw in Bush's character his reluctance to cashier his people reveals a strength. It certainly shows a vast difference between Bush and Dowd. Bush believes in sticking by his subordinates and supporting them until all the facts are in. It's one reason he inspires such fierce loyalty among his staff and cabinet. Dowd, like some Middle-East despot, believes in cutting off peoples' heads as soon as they give the appearance of having screwed up, regardless of what the ultimate facts might turn out to be. It's one reason that so many people find her repellant.
A lot of conservatives think Brown should be fired, too, but the difference between them and Dowd is that they see Bush's willingness to take heat for his people as a virtue and Dowd sees it as a vice. Actually, she sees everything Bush does as a vice.
She then shamelessly insinuates that Bush's people don't care about Katrina's victims because they're just blacks, don't you know.
A lack of empathy? How does she know what Bush and his staff were feeling and doing behind the scenes. As time goes on it's becoming clearer that much of the fault for the predicament of the people trapped in New Orleans, to the extent it wasn't their own, was the fault of their mayor and their governor. Why does she not condemn their lack of empathy? Might it be that they're Democrats (and minorities) while Bush is a white Republican male, a legitimate object of obloquy in the eyes of northeastern liberals like Dowd?
This is the most egregiously dishonest thing she says in the piece. It demonstrates her utter disregard for the truth when a lie will better serve the purpose of slipping the stiletto into Bush's ribs. First, she implies that the administration is racist, but worse, she strongly suggests that the 700 guests of the Hyatt were sent to the front of the line by the feds because the people they were butting ahead of were only poor blacks. What actually happened was this: The people from the Hyatt were tourists who were sent to the head of the line under orders by the black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.
It might be worthwhile to ask Ms Dowd why she chooses not to tell her readers who was responsible for greasing the tourists' exit from town. Evidently, when you need to tarnish a man like the president it's okay at the NY Times to deceive your readers any way you can.
