I hate to say it, but the guy is no Einstein. He shouldn’t have been in the position he was in.
First, he accuses Bush of doing “propaganda” about the Iraq war. If he was paying attention, he would have noticed that the problem is the reverse. The press has been doing propaganda, and Bush and McClelland did not. The press had and always has home-field advantage, they buy their newsprint by the ton after all, but Bush and McClelland owed it to the public to get the story out. They didn’t do it. No help from the DNC mouthpieces in the press, but then you don’t expect them to help. You have to do it, and McClelland didn’t do it. Clearly, he has bought into the DNC propaganda on the war. He believes it, why? because he read it in the paper.
Next, he accuses Rove and Libby of getting their stories straight. He seems not to know that Armitage already confessed. There was nothing for Rove and Libby to get straight in any negative sense of the word, although if I was Rove or Libby and I was being accused of something I didn’t do, and neither Bush nor McClelland were out there defending me, I’d probably want to have a chat.
Get this straight. It was Armitage. Rove and Libby were innocent, and the spokesman who ought to have defended them doesn’t know that.
Katrina?
The governor of Louisiana refused to send in the National Guard because, stop me if you’ve heard this before, because it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t safe, so she would not send in the National Guard.
The rest of the Katrina disaster flowed right out of that disastrous abdication of responsibility.
The federal parts of the puzzle worked as they were supposed to. The Navy was on the scene before the wind stopped blowing. FEMA was on hand ready to answer the calls that never came, because the governor wouldn’t move. National Guardsmen from neighboring states were mobilized, ready to answer the call that never came from the governor who wouldn’t act.
So when did things finally start to move? When Bush finally over-rode the state governor and federalized it. He didn’t have to do it in Mississippi, or Texas, or Alabama, only in New Orleans, where a governor and a mayor refused to act.
But McClelland seems not to have noticed that. As Bush’s chief communicator, he was and is a disaster.
Excellent post.