It’s too late for damage control in New Orleans, but they’re bailing like crazy in the White House.
The Bush administration’s new tactic for dealing with criticism over its handling of Katrina is to say that criticism equals a “blame game.” They’re saying this over and over, like a broken record. Somebody took a poll and discovered that the word “blame” has a lot of negatives, so they’re trying to plaster it on their critics.
It’s all about the angle of language attack. If you say “Stop playing the blame game,” you sound like you’re being grown-up — “blame” is what kids do when somebody’s spilled the milk. But take a few steps to the side and look at this from a different angle. The people who are being charged as “blamers” are really telling the president, “Take responsibility. Be a grown-up!”
If President Bush had gotten up the morning after Katrina and said, “I take responsibility for this situation and we’re going to work as hard as we know how, stay up round the clock, do everything in our power to save our citizens’ lives,” there’d be no blame game for anyone to play. But he did nothing of the kind. Then he compounded the mistake by letting his underlings play a “blame game” of finger-pointing at local officials. Then he had the nerve to have his press office minions complain about everyone else playing the “blame game.”
The American people — and, yes, among them are a lot of angry politicians and journalists, and a multitude of voices here on the Net who have no credentials but their own outrage — aren’t playing games. They’re angry with a leader who failed his people, and who still doesn’t understand what it means to take responsibility in a crisis.
POSTSCRIPT: In Farhad Manjoo’s Salon cover story today, Farhad interviews a former deputy chief of staff of FEMA from the last administration, George Haddow, who basically says that the whole Bush restructuring of FEMA was aimed at setting up local authorities for blame: “According to Haddow, instead of working with local officials to try to minimize the impacts of an impending storm, the White House has decided its best strategy is to keep its distance from people on the ground. That way if anything goes wrong, the White House can ‘attack, attack, attack.’ ” Read it and weep, if you have any tears left.
AND: This great post from Tim Grieve at the War Room demonstrates that, to the Bush administration, all criticism is dismissed as “politics,” and “now” is never “the time for politics” –so shut up, everyone, already!
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