brainrow

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn’t change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president’s first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.

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But on a second go-round, even the right isn’t so easily fooled by this drill…. This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn’t be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.

You could almost see Mr. Bush’s political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.

A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O’Reilly’s usually spin-shellacked “No Spin Zone.” Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted “that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm.” What he didn’t have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.

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On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped “people don’t play politics during this period of time.” Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won’t be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he’ll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won’t Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.

But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy.