Trying to Pin it All on Bush

Despite the best efforts of the Democrats and their associates in the MSM only 13% of the people surveyed in a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll blame President Bush for the New Orleans debacle. The 13% probably encompasses the splenetic Bush-haters who, like the poor, we will always have with us, and maybe a few others.

That all the energy, newsprint and air-time invested in pinning the post-hurricane disaster on Bush didn't yield greater rewards to those who see it as their mission in life to do everything possible to tear down this president must be extremely discouraging to the Left.

Shed a momentary tear, for example, for the disappointment that poor Bob Herbert of the New York Times must feel at this poll result. Mr. Herbert is so consumed with loathing for the president that in a column on Monday he wrote the following:

The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.

Colossal failure? Exactly what was Mr. Bush's failure? What could he have done that he didn't do that would have made a difference? Mr. Herbert chooses not to tell us, quite likely because Mr. Herbert has no idea.

Mr. Herbert seeks to drives the point home. Reciting a litany of suffering and degradation suffered by the victims of Katrina, Herbert concludes by claiming that "the president didn't seem to notice." He offers no support for his libel, but then it's a bit awkward to insist upon factual support from someone whose intent is only to assassinate someone's character and not to uncover truth.

When he senses that the stage has been set and the moment is right, Mr. Herbert dramatically trots out the venerable old warhorse named Racism:

He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.

Yes. While the black folk were suffering, Bush was no doubt traipsing gleefully around his Crawford ranch in white sheets and hood. It would not surprise us to see such an absurd claim from the pen of Mr. Herbert since in his world no evidence is necessary to justify any calumny against the president. Just saying that Bush is a racist is enough to make it so for the cerebrally-challenged, among whom Mr. Herbert must feel at home.

He ends his indictment of the president with this summation:

Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.

And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.

Well. Has it occured to Mr. Herbert to examine Mr. Bush's total tenure in order to form a judgment of the prospects for our future? Evidently not. He prefers to pick a single event, one in which the facts are as yet unclear about Mr. Bush's responsibility, and extrapolate from that to the most dire warnings about the next three years under such an incompetent bumbler.

No thought enters the hate-soaked labyrinths of Mr. Herbert's mind about Bush's response after 9/11, or his liberation of 50 million people and the toppling of one of the most evil men in modern history. Nor does Mr. Herbert deign to remind us of Mr. Bush's widely acclaimed response to the devastating hurricanes which hammered Florida last year. Nor does Mr. Herbert mention how Bush took an economy that was heading into recession when he came to office and which subsequently suffered the heavy blows of 9/11, war in the Middle-east, and sky-rocketing gas prices, and nevertheless nursed it back to a state of health that is absolutely astonishing given the obstacles that had to be overcome.

These facts are all irrelevant to Mr. Herbert. For a day too long after Katrina, Mr. Bush allegedly hesitated when he should have been doing some unspecified thing, and therefore he's the worst person imaginable to be leading us into the days ahead.

Mr. Herbert's entire case reduces to this. People suffered. Help was slow. Bush was president. Therefore Bush is an incompetent racist. Mr. Herbert displays no awareness that there may be reasons why help was slow for which Mr. Bush cannot rationally be held responsible. He displays no inclination to place any blame for the failure to get people out of the city on the mayor and governor, who, with every passing day it becomes more clear, it squarely belongs. He evinces no sign that he is aware of the governor's inexplicable 24 hour hesitation to invite the feds into the state. Indeed, he shows an abject unwillingness to actually engage in any kind of sophisticated thought or analysis at all.

In fairness, perhaps Mr. Herbert, from his exalted perch atop the Mt. Olympus that is the New York Times, is privy to information that is being withheld from us mere mortals, and which he is not at liberty to share - information that would explain exactly what Mr. Bush's fault was and why it is so damning.

Or, more likely, perhaps Mr. Herbert is simply a buffoon who believes that an argument is won by whomever can cram the largest number of unsubstantiated and outrageous allegations into the smallest number of column inches.