Here is how the conversation might go if we could step into a Wayback Machine and travel back to, say, a couple of months after 9/11 to have a little conversation with our previous selves:

“2005?!?! My god, fill me in. These last few weeks have been rough! Give me some hope, okay?”

“Well…”

“Come on! Four years! Where did they finally find Osama? And what did they do to him?”

“Well…”

“I assume the Taliban are long gone from Afghanistan, right? This war we’re fighting can’t take too much longer.”

“Well…”

“And what with the outpouring of international support for the U.S. these days, there must be some wonderful achievements in global cooperation!”

“Well…”

“Oh, yeah, now there are these bizarre anthrax incidents… Who was it, anyway? What a relief it must have been to find that out!”

“Well…”

“You’re not saying very much. What gives?”

“You remember all that talk about Iraq at the start of the first Bush administration? They invaded.”

“Yeah? Don’t tell me — Saddam was behind the anthrax!”

“No, no…”

“Or, what, did he finally find a way to launch his own terrorist attack?”

“Nope.”

“They caught him building a nuke!”

“Well, no.”

“So…?”

“They told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But we never found the weapons, even after we toppled him. Then they told us it didn’t matter because we were building a better democratic Iraq. Then they told us not to give up despite thousands of American casualties, because if we pulled out we’d be dishonoring the soldiers who’d already died.”

“Damn. I guess that means Bush lost the election in ’04, huh?”

“Well…”

“Anyway, the most important thing is that, four years later, the U.S. has had enough time to plan and prepare for another horror. The next time an American city is endangered, we’ll be all set, right? Swift response. Leaders who spring into action. Better communications. Organization. The can-do American spirit.”

“Well…”

“Enough! Get back to the future already! You’re just bumming me out.”

“Hey, you’re bumming me out, too!”

Today’s New York Times has a piece analyzing the “recall” of FEMA’S Michael Brown to Washington. The article does not wonder how this incompetent beneficiary of patronage — and, as more recently revealed, resume-padding hack — managed to avoid being totally canned. No, this was a piece largely guided by anonymous White House sources desperate to paint the story in the light the administration sought. So we get an astonishing paragraph like this:

Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on. “The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information,” said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. “Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult.”

As Brad DeLong interjects here: “Ummm… Watch the television?”

But pause a minute and ponder this line and you realize that the administration’s difficulty “getting truth” here is simply a case of chickens coming home to roost. If you run a government where you reward people who tell you what you want to hear and fire people when they tell you unpleasant truths, you should not be surprised when truth becomes a scarce commodity. The Bush administration’s “tell me no truths” stance was at work in its economic policy long before 9/11; after that calamity, it became the central modus operandi for the Executive Branch, which picked its policies first — invade Iraq while continuing to cut taxes — and then retroactively doctored its information and intelligence (either overtly, or simply by promoting those with the “right” message and firing or silencing dissenters) to fit the policy.

It’s one thing to spin, to present a doctored version of reality to the public in order to sell an agenda. But it became clear long ago that, in the Bush administration’s advanced case of delusional megalomania, the doctored version of reality has become gospel on the inside as well.

So of course Michael Brown, and all the other Michael Browns in the Bush administration, didn’t tell Bush the truth about what was happening. “Everything’s fine, sir! Carry on with your vacation!” Even if they actually knew, which seems unlikely, they understood — as you can bet every commander in Iraq knows — that to do so was to ask to be fired. Mr. Bush is to hear only what Mr. Bush (and Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove) wants to hear. Anything else is disloyalty — a firing offence.

Any organization run on such principles is, of course, a juggernaut of dysfunction, headed for the ditch.

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!

It happens occasionally: I agree entirely with Andrew Sullivan. If President Bush wants to show that he gets how things need to change post-Katrina, he should fire Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, who demonstrated several times this week he had no idea what was going on.

Let there be some accountability. Let there be some sign that our president expects more than loyalty from the people he appoints, but also, you know, that they do their jobs. “This is a competence issue. It’s a question of national security. Fire Brown now,” says Sullivan. Yes.

If Bush takes this step, let’s note, it will be the first time our “CEO president” has held anyone in his administration responsible for any kind of error or mistake.

As I said Friday, you can’t start a Global War on tropical storms. But Doc Searls suggests that the next national effort we’re all going to need to get behind is the “War on Error.” That enemy is everywhere among us.

I was away with family yesterday and this morning and not able to follow much of the Katrina coverage in depth. But it didn’t take much catchup reading today to figure out what’s going on: the Bush administration’s counteroffensive is underway, and the focus is not on solving problems but on placing blame. The line coming from the administration — it’s well traced in a number of places, including this post from Josh Marshall — is that all the trouble with getting relief quickly enough to a devastated American city was the fault of local officials.

This Washington Post piece included a charge, anonymously sourced to a “senior Bush official” — did Karl Rove not learn his lesson from the Plame investigation? — that the governor of Louisiana had failed to declare a state of emergency. But, of course, she had. The story now sits with a big fat correction on the Post’s Web site. This is the old Rove-school tactic of planting a lie that, proverbially, can make it halfway round the world while the truth — and the newspaper correction — is still putting on its boots.

But it’s not just the president’s men anonymously pointing fingers. Here’s what the president himself had to say in his weekly radio address yesterday: “The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, others in his administration are complaining about Louisiana’s tardiness in reaching out for a “multi-state mutual aid pact” and suggesting that state and local authorities failed to take quick enough action to get the federal aid that, it’s implied, Washington was just itching to send.

I don’t doubt that state and local officials made mistakes. And in due time we’ll learn much more. But this disaster is epochal in scale; one reason we have a federal government in the first place is to deal with crises when their scale is simply too great for a state to handle. Instead of taking charge, the Bush administration botched its initial reaction — and now, instead of accepting responsibility and focusing on helping the victims, its officials are covering their posteriors.

The simple juxtaposition in the Post story’s lead says it all:
“Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country’s emergency management.”

No one knows how many thousands are dead. A minimum of hundreds of thousands are homeless. And Bush and his men are passing the buck. It doesn’t get much lower than this.

Nowhere in his actions or statements is there any indication that President Bush understands what the American people expect of a leader faced with a situation like the one we’ve watched unfold this past week. Why are we hearing about the legalisms and the quibbling over jurisdictions and wondering about reports that help was available but waiting on paperwork? Isn’t it the role of a chief executive to know when there’s a crisis that threatens lives and mobilize all his powers to resolve it? If the locals failed to dot the i’s, shouldn’t the president himself have been on the phone with them, doing what politicians do, arguing and cajoling and shouting as needed until the people’s business was taken care of? Isn’t it the president’s job to man the executive branch with officials who know how to flag a looming crisis and say, “Boss, you better pay attention to this?” Wasn’t there anyone in the White House team who knew enough to say to Bush, “Forget the trip to California, don’t touch that guitar, get back here to Washington — we better get out in front of this thing”?

Plenty of people who haven’t in the past borne partisan animus against Bush are personally angry with him now, and rightly so. This “CEO president” has repeatedly failed in the realm that was supposed to be his strong suit — basic management. When crisis management fails on this large a scale, the calamity may only take a quick moment, a day or a week, but inevitably it has been years in the making. In Katrina’s case, it’s the kind of outcome you get when you have a national leader who never fires anyone for doing a lousy job but who instantly dismisses anyone who breaks ranks or speaks out of line. You end up with a government of incompetents and yes-men placeholders who owe their jobs to loyalty and patronage, not achievement and skill. (Cf. Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, whose chief previous experience was as lawyer for the Arabian Horse Trading Association, a job from which he was fired, “forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures,” according to the Boston Herald.)

So now we see the administration revert to type. 9/11 was Bill Clinton’s fault, and the CIA’s fault. The recession was Clinton’s fault, too. The deficit has nothing to do with tax cuts, but is the fault of the famous “trifecta” of war, recession and national emergency. The little screwup about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was, once more, the CIA’s fault, and had nothing to do with the administration’s own misuse of intelligence. And the failure to put enough boots on the ground in postwar Iraq to control the country? That must have been the fault of the generals who didn’t ask for more troops. Torture in Abu Ghraib? No one’s really to blame there except a few bad apples.

Now comes Katrina, and Bush is once again saying, don’t look at me — the buck stops nowhere. If so many lives weren’t on the line in so many places and in so many ways, it might even be funny.

These days I live in something of a cocoon here, doing my writing and dispatching my parenting duties, almost entirely disconnected from the currents of a pop culture that, once upon a time, it was my job to cover. So, for instance, Kanye West is someone I know little about; I’ve heard a bit of his music, but I’d hardly claim to be knowledgeable. I cannot offer critical insight into his actions tonight. But I can applaud his guts.

A few hours ago West got on live national TV during an NBC charity fundraiser for Katrina’s victims and “went off-script” — way off. In a heartfelt, disjointed ramble that went on for close to two minutes, he complained that aid for the poor was coming awfully slowly. He pointed out that a lot of the people who might have helped were busy fighting a war overseas. He said “They’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.” Finally, he blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” (The clip can be found here.)

Mike Myers stood there next to him, stonefaced, after one futile effort to return to the teleprompter’s dialogue. Curiously, the show’s producers allowed West to keep up his off-script ranting until the very moment he mentioned the president’s name. Then it was CUT CUT CUT.

It wasn’t the most carefully composed or easy-to-parse tirade. Maybe some of the words were intemperate. (With what’s been happening in New Orleans, intemperance is surely a natural reaction.) But it was clearly from the heart.

John Darnielle, the Mountain Goats’ singer/songwriter who moonlights as the author of Last Plane to Jakarta, has posted about this and encouraged the dissemination of the image below. I am happy to join the movement.

As the week’s awful events rolled on and the media grew increasingly willing to ask angry questions and confront business-as-usual politicans (Tim Grieve and the War Room gang have kept up with it all), I started wondering, could it happen? Could the Bush administration’s five-year-long winning streak at the reality-subversion game finally be breaking?

If so, it’s fitting that the event that has cracked the spell is not a complex and difficult international crisis, the kind of issue that the president and his men have long used to “create their own reality” around. Nor is it a numbers game like Social Security reform or the inheritance tax, where the administration has gotten away for years with making stuff up. It is a straightforward domestic natural disaster, whose contours are clear to anyone with eyes.

There’s something about corpses in the gutters and starving refugees thronging the streets that brings us all back to the “reality-based community,” real quick.

The delays in the government response this week and the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Bush-on-holiday with the unfolding disaster carried loud echoes of 9/11. But in 2001 it took Bush only three days to respond to the trauma with a moment that appealed to Americans. There was a critical difference then, of course: a human enemy to unite against. “I can hear you!,” Bush shouted into the bullhorn at Ground Zero. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

But who will Bush rally us against this time around? There is no “evil one” to “smoke out.” Nature is not a terrorist. You can’t start a Global War on tropical storms.

You just have to dig in and try to help people, first — then remember to ask what went wrong, figure out who was responsible and plan to do a lot better next time around. The Bush administration seems to lack all interest in that second phase. “Learn from your mistakes” is simply not in their playbook. Still, it seems just possible, in Katrina’s wake, that enough Americans are angry enough to force the president to some kind of accounting.

As I’ve tried to process the cruel “The city is safe!” “No it isn’t!” procession of news streaming out of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of my initial reactions was, “Well, build a city under sea level, what do you expect?” Not charitable or humane, of course, but you can’t censor your own thoughts. It didn’t take more than a few seconds, though, to realize that the reaction wasn’t just mean-spirited but foolish: at the moment I had it, I was sitting in my house in the middle of a major earthquake zone. Floods and storms, quakes and fires — we do our best to cocoon ourselves from danger and feel safe, but one way or another, we’re all nature’s pawns.

Americans have always rebuilt in the wake of disaster: The city I live near and work in, San Francisco, has done so more than once. But plainly this is neither an easy nor a quick prospect in the case of Katrina. I’ve never been to New Orleans, though I’ve enjoyed its music enough — and spent enough time in the kitchen attempting to duplicate its recipes — that I always intended to go one day. I hope I’ll still have the chance. More importantly, for the people caught up in this tragedy, I hope for food and shelter, safety and strength. (You probably don’t need them again, but here are a couple of links with information about how you can help.)

And I hope (against hope) that our nation gets its priorities clearer and begins to reverse this decade’s trend of underinvesting in public services and infrastructure to support improvident tax cuts and a misguided, mismanaged war. We’ll come to our senses eventually, right?