Journal Concern's Journal: Scandalous New Bush "Defense" - Right-Wing Desperate 2
Saw this today...
I think we need a better word for what Karl Rove and Bush do than "spin". "Spin" suggests that there is a generally acknowledged reality which "each side" tries to put the best face or gleam on. Rove acknowledges no such reality.
As we see with the Republican response to Hurricane Katrina, Rove and Bush's approach is to create an entirely fictional master narrative. It isn't just a matter of a lie here or a lie there. It's a completely fabricated alternate reality that competes with the truth.
The point of this false narrative is not so much to delude ordinary people as it is to keep the Republican base from straying off the reservation: the base wants to support Republicans, and they just need any excuse, no matter how feeble, to hang their hats on. Give them a narrative that they can repeat, and they will run with it. It does not matter if the narrative is inconsistent, as the Republicans are past masters of "doublethink" -- the art of believing that two incompatible things are true at the same time.
A bonus of the false narrative is that it plants doubts in the minds of those people who aren't paying too much attention, and can generate pseudo-factoids (e.g. "John Kerry faked going to Vietnam") that can play into the unconscious judgment. But the main point is to keep the base in line.
The problem with producing the false narrative is that it has to be generated and propagated early in order to compete successfully with the truth; it doesn't do much good if people already have another idea in their heads. That means that countering the false narrative also has to start early and be hammered hard: it has to be undermined, not just lie by lie, but comprehensively, and the act of creating the false narrative has to be held up as the monstrous Goebbels-ism that it is. It has to become so disreputable that nobody will ever dare to do it again. We need to destroy their ability to lie. -WIds
And with that, let's take a look at a good example of how this works.
For those coming in late, this is recent leg in a discussion between ellem and I over Bush's role in disaster relief efforts in New Orleans. Ellem has supplied two new stories, both with their genesis in one Bob Williams, President and Senior Research Fellow for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which is a conservative think tank in Washington State. He credits himself as "an ex-State Representative in Washington during the time of the eruption of Mount St. Helens." That too. One is written by Bob himself, the other by an ABC correspondent who appears to have based his work on Bob's.
They attempt to blame local and state officials for failures during the post-Katrina relief effort in New Orleans. To do it, they manipulated quotes and outright lied; even more strangely, their claims are easily disprovable.
Cutting to the chase, the President (in this case, Bush) and his government were responsible for disaster relief, and for good (hopefully obvious) reasons. There is no plausible way for Bush to "pass the buck" and blame others:
"...Once the President declared the State of Emergency on August 26, 2005, it triggered something called 'An Incident of National Significance.' According to the United States National Response Plan, this has quite a few consequences, all of which are designed to put the Federal Government in charge, eliminate delays based on paperwork, and eliminate any need for local officials to ask for help."
But I wouldn't want to deprive you of a detailed point-by-point.
I'll be extensively quoting an already-complete debunking of the article, since there seems to be little to add to it.
The following in italics are quotes from the ABC article:
- "New Orleans' own comprehensive emergency plan raises the specter of 'having large numbers of people
'Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves,' the plan states.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, however, that plan was not followed completely."
'If the [comprehensive emergency] plan were implemented, lives would have been saved,' Williams said."
From the analysis:
"The complete paragraph this quotation was taken from contains the following sentence which was not mentioned in the quote: 'Those evacuated will be directed to temporary sheltering and feeding facilities as needed.' [emph added] When this sentence is included, it becomes clear that the citywide network of busses to bring poor and disabled citizens to the Superdome prior to the hurricane making landfall was the action this section refers to. The Mayor followed the plan exactly, and the source used an out of context quotation to push a blatant falsehood at your reporter. [emph added] The fact that the Mayor set up emergency bussing to get the poor residents to the Superdome undoubtedly saved many lives."
"The City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan Annex I: Hurricanes can be found at the following URL: http://www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26"
- "As one FEMA official told ABC News, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco failed to submit a request for help in a timely manner."
"In fact, the official request for help has been available on the Internet for anyone who has even the slightest inclination to search for it. The official request for help signed by Governor Blanco is dated August 28, 2005 as can be seen on the original document located at http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20Relief%20Request.pdf
"Certainly, a request for help several days prior to the arrival of a hurricane cannot possibly be characterized as 'untimely.' According to the press release at 'The President today declared a major disaster exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts in the area struck by Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 29, 2005, and continuing.'
"In fact, the President had already proactively declared a State of Emergency in Louisiana on August 26, 2005 according to the press release at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050827-1.html
"Therefore, it appears that the Mayor of New Orleans did follow the portion of the NO-CEMP which your 'conservative think-tank president' claimed he didn't. It also appears that the Governor of Louisiana requested federal aid on August 28, and the President promised federal aid on August 29. This proves that attempts to blame the late response on an untimely request by Governor Blanco are patently false, and can be proved false by easily obtainable documents anyone with an internet connection has easy access to."
- And now, onto some more general matters. Let's discuss more generally the notion that federal agencies could have been prevented from responding due to the Governor not specifically asking for them. This is completely untrue.
With respect to the previously named source and this one as well, I will now quote liberally and at length from the commentary of others, as well as the Stafford Act and the United States National Response Plan.
--
"All PRESIDENTIALLY DECLARED DISASTERS AND EMERGENCIES UNDER THE STAFFORD ACT ARE CONSIDERED INCIDENTS OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE." (NRP, 7) (This is a CRITICAL piece of information which your reporters don't seem to have noticed. In fact, the initial emergency declaration from the White House mentions the Stafford Act by name.)"
"When an incident or potential incident is of such severity, magnitude, and/or complexity that it is considered an Incident of National Significance, the Secretary of Homeland Security initiates actions to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the incident." (NRP, 15)
"The President leads the Nation in responding efficiently and ensuring the necessary resources are applied quickly and effectively to all Incidents of National Significance. (NHP, 15)
"The Secretary of Defense authorizes Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) for domestic incidents as directed by the President or when consistent with military readiness operations and appropriate under the circumstances and the law.
"Imminently serious conditions resulting from any civil emergency may require immediate action to save lives, prevent human suffering, or to mitigate property damage.
"When such conditions exist and time does not permit approval from higher headquarters, local military commands and responsible officers from the DOD are authorized by DOD directive and pre-approved by the Secretary of Defense to take necessary action to response to the request of civil authorities." (NPR, 42)
"Standard procedures regarding requests for assistance may be expedited, or under extreme circumstances, suspended in the immediate aftermath of an event of catastrophic magnitude." (NRP, 44)
"After reading these quotations from the United States National Response Plan, it should be clear that the Federal Government faced no impediments to action due to paperwork requirements, or lack of communication with state or local officials. The President put into action a plan which allows Federal Agencies to suspend standard procedures regarding requests for assistance."
--
Additional notes:
- Federal departments and agencies are EXPECTED to provide:
- initial and/or ongoing response, when warranted, under their own authority and funding;
- alert, notification, pre-positioning and timely delivery of resources;
- proactive support for catastrophic or potentially catastrophic incidents using protocols for expedited delivery of resources. (NRP, 6)
- initial and/or ongoing response, when warranted, under their own authority and funding;
- FEMA press release ackowledging "...President Bush authorized the aid under an emergency disaster declaration issued following a review of FEMA's analysis of the state's request for federal assistance..." dated August 27th.
- When President Bush declared Katrina a disaster (link), he EXPLICITY invokes Title V of the Stafford Act. Thus, Katrina became an Incident of National Significance on August 26, THREE DAYS before landfall, and FIVE DAYS before Chertoff mistakenly thought he had to declare it as such.
--
Final thoughts...
I've now seen and dispatched three shockingly deceitful attempts to cover up Bush's failures and weasel out of his responsbilities, each one more brazen, awful, and evilly clever than the last. As far as I can tell there was hardly anything true in any of them.
What's really surprising about this is that what's happened is so obvious. Propagandists usually know to skirt the edges of the obvious, rather than attacking it head on.
The truth is simple. He had the opportunity, the authority, and the means to save those people, and he didn't do it, either through incompetence, or indifference. You decide which alternative you think is worse.
They begged him for help, to build up their protection against storms, and he failed them. They begged him to rescue them when the storm came, and he sent them Michael Brown, Arabian Horse Expert. They died by the thousands, Americans, in the streets of a destroyed American city.
No other first-world nation would willingly suffer a leader after so gross, so callous a failure.
I'm morbidly curious to see what comes next... but in my opinion, this hysterical fit of the Right-wing propaganda machine is almost as big a news story as the hurricane itself. The hurricane is over. Bush and his government's calamity of error and negligence in the relief effort is winding down. But these bits of propaganda tell a story of disaster after disaster to come, where the people in charge might no longer be held accountable to their superiors, the people of this country. They show us a future where even human tragedies on this scale can be bathed clean in the stew of improbable lies and cult-like party devotion.
They've finally gone too far. To the extent that propaganda like this paves the way for future bloody catastrophes by our government, there is blood on the hands of these propagandists.
Apparently... (Score:2)
If the roles were reversed and this was a president whose actions I'd defended, and ellem had busted me this badly, my faith would be shaken. I would admit I was wrong, I would apologize, I would go away and soul search and figure out where I went wrong.
I'm wondering where ellem is on this. Where all Republicans are, really. Do you just close down and pretend it's not real? Will we start again from zero on the next mass death?
That's the crux of the biscuit (Score:2)
You've just put your finger on why the Democrats are out in the wilderness, still trying in a disembodied way to figure out where to go from here, while the Republicans staunchly march alongside their Fearless Leader.
Those who tend toward an interpretat