WILLFUL OBTUSENESS. I certainly hope that Garance is right and the president’s standard P.R. modus operandi won’t work for him or his party this time, but there’s certainly ample indication at this point that the press is going to happily do its usual job of facilitating the implementation of just such a strategy.

Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert gave a press conference yesterday announcing the formation of a bipartisan congressional inquiry into the federal response to Katrina. No Democrats were invited to the announcement, and, clearly, no Democrats had been included in the inquiry’s planning. This was not subtle. It was crudely, cartoonishly obvious what was going on. And The New York Times decided to run an article about it today under the headline “Bipartisan Inquiry Proposed,” barely bothering to mention briefly, toward the bottom of the piece, that Democrats had been shut out of the process.

Today, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid both announced that Democrats will not participate in such a farcical “bipartisan” process. Pelosi held her weekly press conference this afternoon, and the questions she endured from journalists were, almost to a one, truly abominable. Even granting that press questions should always have a quality of Devil’s advocate provocation to them, these were egregious. A sampling:

Madam Leader, on this committee it is a catch-22 situation. If you don't appoint Members, it won't be bipartisan. Are you boycotting?

Second question, why not give it a chance? Susan Collins has already been announced as Senate chair. She announced earlier in the week, with Joe Lieberman. She wants a serious investigation. Why not see if it can work?

What about Susan Collins? Don't you trust her?

If Republicans don't agree to do this and they don't give you equal representation, are you comfortable with these hearings being on national television with no Democrats sitting in the room? Do your rank and file get that? Do they agree with you on that?

Are you willing to negotiate compromise now? Are you willing to go meet with Speaker Hastert?

Madam Leader, at least one Republican told me yesterday that the reason you were not invited into the fold on that thing was that you had poisoned the atmosphere when you called the President oblivious and dangerous. What about that criticism? Have you gone too far with this, and have you contributed to the breakdown of the two parties?

Madam Leader, given the scope and dimension of this storm, the once-in-a-lifetime aspect, just incredible story, do you think those affected by it, and even folks just looking in on this process, are going to understand that the Democratic Leader of the House is not participating in a hearing because there are a few more Republicans on the committee, and there might be some tweaking of subpoena powers?

And on and on it went. I dearly hope the House Minority Leader’s office makes the full transcript of the press conference available on its website soon. In the face of clearly willed and deliberate obtuseness, Pelosi was eloquent, insistent, and powerful. Here, for example, was her answer to the inane question about Susan Collins:

I am the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. I have had my conversations, my proposals to work cooperatively with the Speaker on this. I started by asking the Speaker and the President to call the special session of Congress last week to deal with these issues so that we could work together. I then said: "Let's get a task force together so that we can expedite the decision-making." It had nothing to do with oversight because we didn't know that everything was going to go so bad until a few days later.

Now everybody sees that something went wrong, even though I don't know that the President knows that. As he said to me in the White House Tuesday, "What didn't go right last week?" This is what we are dealing with.

Therefore, I will not be naming Members to a committee that is presented as bipartisan, which is not bipartisan. When the Republicans are ready to work together, I would be happy, and I have a lot of eager Members who are ready to serve on such a committee. But I'm afraid that that is now impossible because of the poor intentions of the Republicans. I think they made it very clear. They made it clear when they made their unilateral announcement of a bipartisan committee. Isn't it obvious to you?

Later she continues in this vein, spelling out for journalists who were clearly pretending, just for the hell of it, not to understand, what it was that might be objectionable to Democrats about an announced bipartisan committee that Democratic leaders had to hear about from news reports:

When I originally spoke to the Speaker, I had talked about an evenly divided committee that had true subpoena power. That is something that can be greatly hindered, depending on what you mean by subpoena power, and that is something you have to talk about, and you have to legislate to give a task force that, and have some authority so that they can act immediately upon some of the issues. It didn't mean that they will act on all of them. Some will be recommendations to other committees.

So, in good faith, I was hoping that we would have this coming together for the public good to get the job done, to assess, to anticipate, to help the American people. But clearly they pushed those good intentions aside and just said that's not where we're going with this. But again it's true to form. No oversight of this Administration. And now they continue that same course of action.

But the unctuous, asinine questions kept coming, one after another after another.

--Sam Rosenfeld

UNBELIEVABLE -- GOP REPS VOTE "NO" ON HURRICANE VICTIM AID. To the general category of "what is wrong with people?!?!" you can now add the fact that eleven house G.O.P. members voted against providing victims of Hurricane Katrina with $51 billion in aid. Oliver Willis has the goods.

Meanwhile, the president has suspended minimum-wage rules for the reconstruction effort, arguing in a proclamation that "The wage rates imposed by section 3142 of title 40, United States Code, increase the cost to the Federal Government of providing Federal assistance to these areas."

Good thing there are no problems with poverty or inequality in the Katrina-affected areas where these jobs will be located.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE MYTH OF REPUBLICAN P.R. MASTERY. Emerging conventional wisdom on the blogs this week is that the Bush administration excels only at public relations and is terrible at actually managing and governing. I'm not sure that that's actually the case. The Bush public-relations offensive over the past week has, in point of fact, been a total flop.

Now, the Bush administration is very good at one particular kind of public-relations offensive: one that demonizes a domestic opponent, shifts blame, stages photo-ops in highly controlled settings, and aggressively pushes out talking points and research at reporters as part of a partisan attack. But there are lots of different ways to pursue public-relations goals, and the campaign-style P.R. approach now ramping up -- Laura Rozen reports that FEMA has even hired one of the fellows who ran the administration's Social Security war room and did press for the Republican National Convention -- strikes me as kind of played out and wholly inappropriate to present circumstances. At a time when the nation should be coming together and asking tough questions about preparedness, sending out campaign-style research reports attacking Democratic leaders and activists demonstrates a disappointing business-as-usual mentality. Right now attack politics just look lame.

George W. Bush had an opportunity to turn the hurricane and inadequate federal response to his advantage and to unify the nation. There is no reason on earth that his Katrina response approval rating had to sink to 38 percent, as it has in the latest CBS News poll, and the fact that it's that low shows how inept the administration and the Republicans have been not just at governing, but in conducting public-relations initiatives.

Think about it. What if Bush had personally gone down to the Superdome last Thursday or Friday and started handing out water himself? Sure, it would have been a P.R. stunt, just like his staged photo-ops with fire-fighters and rescue personnel were. But it would have been an effective stunt, rather than a transparent flop, because it would have demonstrated leadership and resolve. Handled properly, Bush's response to Katrina could have massively shored up Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman's effort to attract black voters to the GOP and helped lift his falling poll ratings. Certainly Bush would have faced the anger of those trapped at the Superdome had he gone there -- an unpredictable situation -- but he could have used his fleet of presidential aircraft to bring in supplies for them to mitigate that, or turned Air Force One into a relief conduit that dropped off supplies before bringing the president in, giving him a grateful and relieved audience. Or he could have worked with the Red Cross to get some kind of private relief effort in place. At such a moment of crisis, who cared what the chain of command was or whose responsibility it was to act? Anyone with the power to mitigate the horror had a personal obligation to do so, and Bush, as commander-in-chief, personally could have done a lot to help people out if he'd wanted to; the nation would have cheered him if he had. Instead, his visits to Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi did little to shore up his support, show leadership, or change facts on the ground.

Bush's obvious detachment has likely torpedoed the GOP effort to attract African-Americans for another generation, led to on-air discussions on major national networks about whether or not he's a racist (talk about P.R. nightmares), damaged his standing as a leader, thrown the press into open revolt, and scandalized the world.

I don't know what you call that, but I don't call that effective P.R. I call that a total P.R. meltdown.

Even now, Bush is missing a critical P.R. opportunity. Instead of ordering ever more GOP flunkies to talk smack about Democrats and blame them for the failures in New Orleans, Bush could invite the hurricane survivors now lodged in the D.C. Armory over for dinner, or at the very least go down to the Armory and welcome them to Washington. He could invite the kids over for T-ball or ice cream. Or if he doesn't want to do it, he could have Laura Bush make those neighborly gestures. She was great on her feet when she visited Louisiana, radiating sadness and sympathy and caring with such genuineness (or skill, I suppose) that it put her husband to shame.

But that's not how the administration's P.R. pros work. They don't do empathy and generosity and unifying gestures. They have one tactic and one tactic only: attack and divide. They're great at it. But it's not what the circumstances call for, and not what the nation wants to see.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

SECTION 8 FOR KATRINA. Thanks to Alex Tabarrok, a movement is afoot in libertarian portions of the blogosphere to get people behind the idea of housing the Katrina refugees through an expansion of the Section 8 Housing Vouchers program, one of your more libertarian-friendly government programs. It's a good idea, both for Katrina victims and as a general matter. Section 8 has been a real housing policy success story, deserves support, and is the most pragmatically workable way of getting people out of the Astrodome and into proper houses.

Nevertheless, I could hardly mention this without bringing up that my very first web article for the Prospect was about the Section 8 cuts being implemented by Congress about two years ago. It's an excellent signpost of what kind of scum is running the government that they decided to go after Section 8. As reflected by various positive things being said about this idea by people not inclined to support big-government spending schemes, Section 8 is about the last thing you'd think conservatives would want to take the ax to on the merits. But since the coalition behind Section 8 (just poor people) is even weaker than those behind food stamps (the poor and farm interests, until they were pitted into direct competition against subsidies) and heating assistance (the poor and oil companies) it was the first anti-poverty program to start starving.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE IDEOLOGY OF WASTE. One prominent liberal meme going around is that Katrina shows us, in part, the consequences of decades of anti-government conservative rule in Washington (and, I would add, centuries of it in Baton Rouge). One common counterattack from conservatives and libertarians has been to note that Bush has not been much of a small government advocate and that there's no contradiction between thinking the government should only do a few things and thinking that it should do those few things well. I largely agree with that, but I think it points to the extent to which the Bush administration's "starve the beast" brand of conservatism is uniquely dangerous.

If you wanted to go about trimming the government in a principled way by cutting spending, you'd start off with things that are genuinely pointless (farm subsidies) or else hugely expensive (Medicare). When you try, instead, to attack it purely from the revenue side and hope this will "force" spending cuts in the future, you're all but guaranteeing that the cuts will be focused on programs that just happen to lack powerful constituencies. That means, as we've seen, anti-poverty spending and spending aimed at either forestalling long-term problems or else preventing low-probability ones. That's terrible public policy, but it's the only possible result of the strategy the Republican Party has adopted.

As a result, yes, everyone who's endorsed Bush's various tax cuts -- from Alan Greenspan on down -- deserves their share of the blame. When you support a cut that's not explicitly paid for, you're implicitly supporting spending cuts. And not "spending cuts" in the abstract or the spending that you happen to think should be cut, but the spending that is, in fact, likely to be cut as a result. Which is precisely to say spending on worthy, non-porky infrastructure, and spending on poor people. It's easy to say that the money could be found in less destructive ways, but if it isn't found that way up front, it isn't going to be found that way amidst the murk of the appropriations process.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE CAVALRY ISN'T COMING. Along with bemoaning the reshackled press, I thought I might mention Chuck Hagel's speech from a couple of days ago at the America's Purpose conference. There's nothing really notable about it -- which is the point. In a typically Hagelian manner, if you know how to read between the lines it's clearly an expression of deep disatisfaction with the administration's handling of foreign policy. If, that is, you know how to read between the lines. If you -- like most people -- don't, then it's just a series of banal observations about how it's good to do good stuff and important to do important stuff.

I link the two issues, because I think these two notions -- that the press will "wake up" one day and that moderate or dissident Republicans will "stand up" and sink the Bush administration -- are exercising a dangerous influence on liberal thinking. I won't promise they'll never happen, but people should understand that media crappiness and moderate cowardice both have deep structural roots and that deviations from the norm should be understood as just that -- deviations, not harbingers of trends. I'll be happy to be proven wrong one day, but liberals do themselves a disservice by constantly expecting it to happen. Realistically, if liberals want to survive and even thrive in the contemporary environment they need to learn not to count on anyone suddenly coming to the rescue one day.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: STRIP SEARCH. John Roberts could support the radical right's push to strip their pet issues from the courts -- or he could stand up against it. Which he wants to do is unclear, writes Bert Brandenburg, and he should clarify it for the sake of the Court.

--The Editors

REVERTING TO TYPE. Reading the major dailies today only reconfirms Matt’s point that the media is now clearly reshackling its Katrina coverage to the hideous he-said, she-said strictures of mainstream "partisan food-fight" political reporting. The piece he cited was typically bad, but it’s been a while since I’ve read newspaper articles as simultaneously wearying and infuriating as this Washington Post story on the “controversy” surrounding Hillary Clinton’s vocal criticisms of the disaster response (is she just positioning herself for ’08? is she overplaying her hand?) or this New York Times write-up of congressional Republicans’ proposed investigation, which, under the headline “Bipartisan Inquiry Proposed,” waits until the fifteenth paragraph to merely note Democrats’ “skepticism” about the panel's bipartisan nature. It's back to business as usual.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TAKING CULTURE SERIOUSLY. Advancing loose talk of a grand bargain to start getting serious about poverty, David Brooks' new column suggests that we take advantage of the mass displacement of the population of New Orleans to try and resettle people in class-integrated environments. It seems like a sensible idea to me. Conservative talk about the cultural sources of poverty often strikes me as fundamentally motivated by a search for excuses for doing nothing, but there's much truth to the idea and insofar as it leads people to constructive policy ideas, they're worth embracing.

Less appealing are these efforts to use Katrina as a pretext for subverting No Child Left Behind's accountability provisions. There is a real problem the NEA is pointing to in this vicinity, but their proposed remedy goes far beyond what's needed. Tying these threads together, I think one virtue of NCLB's steps in the direction of standardization that liberals tend to miss is that if you want to improve educational opportunities for poor children, the improvements need to be pretty systemic. In Shaw, where I live, we have your typical "transitional neighborhood" mix of poor and working-class families, childless young professionals, and bad public schools. It would be nice to think that if the schools got dramatically better, the local kids would start getting a dramatically better education. Realistically, though, all that would happen is property values would skyrocket and their parents (and, indeed, I) would be priced out of the area as more prosperous families move in.

That's going to be the result unless pretty much all the underperforming schools in a given area get better. Plus, education is to a large extent a question of equity and not just quality (because the labor market and college admissions have significant zero-sum aspects), so impediments to further improving already-good schools are to some extent desirable (though perhaps it's best for NCLB advocates not to mention this in public), which is part of what standardization does. Needless to say, old-school liberal remedies like not cutting food stamps and not slashing Medicaid are also good ideas. Conservative critics of traditional anti-poverty programs often seem to me to be missing the point -- subsidized food purchases don't typically lift people out if impoverishment, but they do make sure that poor people can buy food (similar logic applies to Medicaid, Section 8 housing assistance, etc.), which is a worthwhile goal on its own.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE CORRUPT INVESTIGATING THE INEPT. I think a lot of liberals got their hopes up that last week's solid Katrina coverage was a harbinger of better media behavior to come. I'm a lot less sanguine. The GOP, having apparently decided that they can't get away with the farce of letting the White House investigate the White House's handling of the hurricane, has decided instead to do it with an ordinary congressional panel. That means a majority on the committee will be Republicans; it will be able to subpoena anything the GOP wants, and nothing the Democrats want. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be bad enough, but the 21st-century congressional Republican Party has really been unique in its absolute fealty to the White House. We haven't seen any congressional oversight at all. Even clear-cut no-nos that the Republican members have self-interested reasons to be upset about and that upset significant elements of the broader conservative movement, like the whole lying to Congress about the Medicare bill thing, have gone un-investigated and un-punished.

Naturally enough, the coverage of the Republican plan gives you no flavor of any of that. Instead, it's just your typical D.C. partisan food-fight coverage reflecting the most entrenched bit of media bias around -- a die-hard commitment to moral equivalence. If one party is maneuvering for partisan advantage it must be that both partyies are. If something bad happens, it must be that both parties are equally at fault. Compromise is always good, and anyone capable of maintaining power must deserve it. Fortunately, it looks like the Democrats are pushing back on this and, if they're lucky, once New Orleans' refugees get a bit settled we'll see some kind of victim's group capable of exerting independent pressure, but don't get your hopes up about the media.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT CEOS WORRY ABOUT. I see that mockery for George W. Bush's "CEO president" image is back in style. The general thought is that, as Kevin Drum wrote last year, he's "a mediocre CEO." Although that certainly may be true, there's also the possibility that a CEO just isn't the right person for the presidency.

Consider a survey question in the current issue of NYSE Magazine, asked of 103 CEOs: "Which factors will have a strong impact on profitability in 2006? Over the next five years?" Of the 15 factors listed, "overregulation" was the top response on both measures by a large margin; the least-frequent response on both was "security/terrorism." Sound like any CEO presidents you can think of? Catastrophic events are just not something a CEO plans for on a day-to-day basis -- either you're screwed and your pre-existing plans don't make much of a difference, or you've got insurance to cover it and you just cut what losses you must.

Countries and presidents should have a different set of concerns. I always thought that went without saying.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the best part of the study: 60 percent of these top CEOs feel that the CEO role is less "fun" than it was five years ago. Doesn't that just break your heart?

--Jeffrey Dubner

FEMA -- BREAKING IT DOWN FOR THE KIDZ. An eagle-eyed reader's found one thing the beleagured Federal Emergency Management Agency apparently had time to spend your tax dollars on when it wasn't working on dragging its feet: It produced a rap-style song about flood preparation. I kid you not. Check out the "FEMA for KIDZ RAP" at fema.gov:

Disaster . . . it can happen anywhere,
But we've got a few tips, so you can be prepared
For floods, tornadoes, or even a 'quake,
You've got to be ready - so your heart don't break.

Disaster prep is your responsibility
And mitigation is important to our agency.

People helping people is what we do
And FEMA is there to help see you through
When disaster strikes, we are at our best
But we're ready all the time, 'cause disasters don't rest.

I wonder what Kanye West would have to say about this. At least the feds were honest and upfront about what they see as an appropriate division of labor: "Disaster prep is your responsibility." Guess that must be why they were the part of the Department of Homeland Security "tasked with Disaster Mitigation, Preparedness, Response & Recovery planning."

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: UN-REFORMED. Wasn't John Bolton the right guy to reform the UN? Instead, all he's done is make substantive reform at the UN summit exceedingly unlikely, reports Mark Leon Goldberg. Surprise, surprise.

--The Editors

AMERICA'S PURPOSE, NOW ON VIDEO. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the presentations at the Terrorism, Security, and America's Purpose conference held here in Washington over the past two days -- and much discussed in the blogopshere -- are now available for perusing at your leisure in video file format. Not all the speeches are up yet, but they should be very soon. This is an excellent use of web technology and the sort of thing I wish all conferences would do, for the benefit of those who can't attend or spend a day watching C-SPAN.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

WHY SO BLIND? I know you're not supposed to quote Steve Sailer because he writes stuff like this, but nevertheless, I think he makes a good point here:

It sure seemed obvious that the Administration was clueless in Iraq and many other places, but the press has consistently given the Bushies the benefit of the doubt on basic competence, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

I think the most likely reason is that the press admired the skill the Administration has displayed in manipulating the press. Reporters, many of whom have themselves considered working on the PR side of the media racket, were so professionally impressed by how well the Bushies organized photo ops, managed the leaking process, and spun the news for them that they found it hard to believe that the Administration was as inept as it appeared at its lawfully mandated tasks.

That seems right to me. One of the paradoxical things we've learned about media manipulation in the past few years is that a healthy scorn for the White House press corps goes a long way. Aggressively "managing" the press breeds not resentment, but a weird kind of admiration with lots of beneficial spillover consequences for actual coverage that persist notwithstanding the fact that, in private, few reporters seem to hold Bush in high regard.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: MORE THAN BLACK AND WHITE. New Orleans' racial politics have always been more complicated than many people realize. LaNitra Walker details a bit of New Orleans' history and why there are many more factors at play than just black and white.

--The Editors

BASES AND BALANCING. To try and advance our ongoing debate, I don't think it makes any sense at all to be so sanguine about the concept of permanent military bases in Iraq. For one thing, it's widely acknowledged that this is a huge source of tensions in Iraq. Larry Diamond recounts from his CPA days that all sorts of uncontroversial goals were always being subverted by constant American efforts to get some kind of bases deal locked down before Iraq had a democratically elected government. Garance says disavowing bases would "be inconsistent with our military history," but not really.

For a long time, up until the Persian Gulf War, the United States avoided basing troops on the Arabian peninsula, preferring to count on relationships with regional allies and our ability to move forces into the area if necessary to safeguard our interests. That worked very well, and the Gulf War showed that we were perfectly capable of moving a lot of troops to the Gulf when we had a good reason to do so. Then the first Bush administration brought the war to a very odd conclusion, leaving Saddam Hussein in power but attaching so many restrictions to his behavior that we needed a permanent troop presence next door to monitor his compliance. The stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia proved controversial (which was why we hadn't done it before) and, indeed, seems to have inspired Osama bin Laden to launch war on the United States.

It's been little noted, but the Bush administration decided (quite appropriately in my view) to break with precedent and "appease" terrorists by trying to shift away from those Saudi bases. Unfortunately, their ideas seems to be to replace them with bases in Qatar and Iraq. But if you recognize why the Saudi bases were problematic, you ought to be able to see that moving the bases is just relocating the problem rather than resolving it. A return to the traditional offshore balancing strategy could do a lot to reduce tensions in the area and let us avoid entanglement with the region's internal political problems. As a fringe benefit, increased reliance on the Navy in the CENTCOM theater might give their officers something better to do with their time than agitating for war with China.

--Matthew Yglesias

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: NARROWING BROADBAND. What happens when a telecom lobbyist chairs the FCC? Cheap access to the Internet is sacrificed for the sake of the bells, of course. Toshiro Sugihara explains why a recent FCC ruling is so pernicious.

--The Editors

THE TRUTH ABOUT CARTER. Mark Schmitt assesses the widely-accepted view that Jimmy Carter was incompetent as president and compares his record to that of the current president, concluding by looking forward to the era when "Bush" like "Carter" is a byword for bad management. I don't think it'll happen. Carter gets his bad reputation primarily from the fact that the late 1970s were a very bad time in America to be a middle-class professional. Journalists, academics, economists, stock analysts, etc. -- all suffered a lot from inflation. Lots of people -- union members, poor people, retirees -- did very well in the '70s, but they don't get to shape opinion and popular memory.

The Bush years have been the reverse. It's a fine time to be an asset-owning professional, but a terrible time to be poor, in debt, reliant wholly on wage income, or to have your son serving in the Army. But the losers in these years, like the winners in the Carter years, don't get to shape opinion and popular memory. That stuff matters, especially for how events get remembered in retrospect. That opinion-makers continue to recall the late 1970s -- rather than the mid-1980s -- as the nadir of post-Depression America has led to unthinking, near-universal acceptance of the view that Ronald Reagan led to better economic performance than his predecessor was able to achieve. The truth, however, is that which was better all depends on who you were. But people who write books and articles and produce TV shows really did do better under Reagan than Carter, so that's what all the books and articles and TV shows say, so everyone believes it.

--Matthew Yglesias

FROM KANYE WEST TO JOHN BOLTON. Last week the hip-hop star Kanye West caused quite the stir when he said something he wasn’t supposed to. Today, Dan Simpson of the Toledo Blade offers a variation on the theme:

It is horrible to say, but the Bush Administration’s slow, inadequate, insensitive response to the tragedy in New Orleans makes what Mr. Bolton is doing in New York very clear: These people don’t care about poor, non-white, sick, helpless people anywhere, not even in the United States ...

The only possible advantage of the flooding disaster is that the rest of the world at least now gets it: the Bush Administration is at least consistent. It doesn’t care about the poor and suffering of the United States any more than it does about the poor and suffering of the rest of the world.

Until Katrina there might have been some reason for them to believe that America’s lack of concern about world poverty, which puts it 12th among the world’s 21 richest nations in aid, had a basis in xenophobia. There is a clear streak of that trait in some Americans’ smugness, belief in our superiority, in Bush Administration senior officials’ sounding off about how we are spreading democracy and our system of government around the world, and the attempted export of other Bush Administration dogma — abstinence and other anti-choice policies, as opposed to an HIV/AIDS policy, as one example.

So, in that sense, the administration’s weak, late flood response, preceded by years of neglect of New Orleans’ anti-flooding infrastructure, shows the world some policy consistency.

The majority of the victims of the New Orleans tragedy and the majority of the world’s poor resemble each other. The persons displaced by the flooding are predominantly black and poor.

I’ll remain agnostic as to whether or not Katrina revealed in Bush a deep resentment of American blacks. But one thing is certain: It’s easy to suspect malicious motives when incompetence runs so deep. Similarly, those (few) of us who have been following the negotiations over UN reform in advance of the summit next week are left bewildered by the administration’s approach to the talks. On the one hand, the decision to gut the section that deals with development issues has become something of a strategic failure; last night the United States was forced to back down from its insistence that all reference to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) be stricken from the reform package. Ambassador John Bolton had previously sought to eliminate reference to the MDGs in a clear effort to shift the goalposts in such a way that the eventual concession of reference to the MDGs could be spun as a major breakthrough. But his negotiating adversaries were not easily hoodwinked into thinking that reinserting something wholly uncontroversial (and something that the United States had agreed upon prior to his arrival) was a major concession. Rather, the United States found itself completely isolated, so Bolton relented, and brought the American negotiating position back to where it was three weeks ago.

One could point to this dance over reference to the MDGs as yet another example of the administration’s incompetent diplomatic skills; despite this incompetence, one could argue, the administration still wants UN reform to succeed.

But on the other hand, there’s evidence, mostly anecdotal at this point, which suggests that sheer malice remains a guiding principle during these negotiations as well. Consider the following tale relayed to me by a reliable inside source: On Monday, the United States introduced an amendment to the portion of the development section dealing with HIV that called for recognition of the increase in international funding made available to fight AIDS. The G-77 said they could accept that amendment so long as the text also recognizes that additional funding and efforts needed to be made available to fight the pandemic. The U.S. negotiator, however, vehemently rejected that suggestion and in the process called the G-77 “greedy.” At that point the Jamaican ambassador, speaking on behalf of the G-77, noted that the environment was not conducive to negotiation and suspended the talks.

Those at the helm of the administration’s UN reform project seem to be missing the principle that to get a little, we need to give a little. Until they can show the rest of the world that they understand this, the jury is still out on whether or not the administration wants UN reform to succeed in the end.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE BLAME GAME. A brief comment on the subject of this game, which, apparently, it's a bad idea to play. First off -- it's not a game. Assigning blame is a deadly serious matter. It's also integral to any sort of viable social practice. The criminal justice system relies on assigning blame to various people and punishing them. So does the civil tort system, and so does the non-criminal regulatory system. So, for that matter, does any kind of coherent business or non-profit enterprise -- when mistakes are made, you need to decide who's to blame for them, and ensure that the culpable are sanctioned. If you don't identify and punish the blameworthy, then people will have no reason to try to do their jobs correctly.

Politics is the same way. There's a very serious principle-agent problem associated with public policy -- the interests of government officials tend to diverge quite sharply from those of the citizens they're supposed to be serving. This is why dictatorships tend, in practice, to ill-serve their citizens and be beset by corruption, malgovernment, and all kinds of other problems. In democracies we try, through elections and the ability of elected officials to fire their subordinates, to align those incentives. The way that works is that when bad things happen, people are supposed to blame someone, and then elect someone else to replace him. For that to do any good, you need to "play the blame game," which is to say find out who's actually responsible.

--Matthew Yglesias

BUT PROTESTORS ARE DEMANDING WITHDRAWAL "NOW." Atrios responds to my post on Clark's description of a long and bloody "immediate withdrawal" from Iraq by saying:

Most people throwing around the phrase don't really think it means "turn tail and RUN RUN RUN AS FAST YOU CAN" out of Iraq. What they mean is we should set a timetable for getting out of Iraq as soon as we reasonably can. Certainly the meaning of the phrase "as soon as we reasonably can" is subject to debate, but I don't really think "getting out as fast as we can even if it means we incur massive casualties on the way out" is what anyone really has in mind.

I wish that were in fact the case. But it's not. Cindy Sheehan's cross-country tour from Crawford to D.C., now totally eclipsed as a story by Hurricane Katrina, is called the "Bring Them Home Now" tour. The giant march scheduled for September 24 in Washington will feature similar demands. Unless the meaning of the word "now" is up for debate, it appears that a considerable fraction of the anti-war left has lined up behind a demand for a military strategy that Clark has described as likely to be highly deleterious to U.S. troops and long-term interests.

Now, I understand that in politics people often have to demand impossible, unlikely, and -- frankly -- undesirable courses of action as a way of altering political debate and creating room for more moderate approaches that are more desirable. A vigorous anti-war movement demanding immediate withdrawal may well create a sense of urgency around a change of course in Iraq, with withdrawal itself only occuring sometime in the next six months to two years, and leaving military bases behind. (I know that plenty of smart observers have said that establishing permanent military bases in Iraq will be seen as a provocation, but I have great difficulty imagining that America will not maintain bases in Iraq for at least a few years after the bulk of troops are withdrawn. It would be inconsistent with our military history.) Demands for immediate withdrawal, however, may also weaken the middle by making the public conversation a debate between the dueling poles of Bush's current ad hoc "strategy" -- if it can even be called that -- and the cut-and-run strategy his administration has purported is the only alternative.

In reality -- as far as I can tell -- the debate in foreign-policy circles is no longer whether to end the war and withdraw American troops, but how and when to do so. That's pretty much the debate in the blogosphere, too, as Atrios notes. But let's all be clear that there are still a heck of a lot of very vocal people who really do believe in withdrawal now, because they don't buy the argument that there's anything that can be gained by remaining in Iraq one additional day and they have no confidence that the administration will make a change of course, no matter what people like Clark recommend, or that the third ways being proposed have any substantive validity.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

IMMEDIACY AND FUTILITY. Two points in response to Garance's post on Wesley Clark and exiting Iraq. The first thing to say is to echo Atrios' point that "immediate withdrawal" from Iraq in the sense that Clark is using the phrase is a strawman. Obviously it would be impractical to withdraw immediately if by "immediately" you mean something like "this afternoon" or "tomorrow morning." The result would just be chaos and get more people killed than keeping them there does.

What people are calling for is the immediate announcement of a withdrawal schedule. The precise details of the schedule would need to be determined in part by military logistics. My preference would be for it also to be pegged to an objective date on the Iraqi political calendar. The forthcoming elections under the new constitution seems like a reasonable marker to me; troops would be leaving because they could turn things over to a legitimate Iraqi political authority.

Beyond that, one of the disadvantages folks who agree with me face is that we're too honest to deny that there's a very good chance that bad things will happen after we leave Iraq. Our point isn't to deny that. It's to deny that things can be made any better by staying. I would like to believe that Clark (or Joe Biden or whomever) has an awesome plan for turning the situation around in Iraq, but he just doesn't. Indeed, by the time of yesterday's conference he'd already dropped one plank from his recent Washington Post op-ed outlining a plan for the country -- a comically impractical scheme to recruit 10,000 Arab-Americans to serve as translators in Mesopotamia. What's left are pseudo-ideas like trying harder to broker a compromise between Iraq's factions. But at the end of the day, compromising is something only Iraqis can do. With a good compromise, they can make it out of this situation alright, with or without the Marines by their side. Without one, all the Marines we have can't save the day.

--Matthew Yglesias

TAX CUTS. Congress was set to pass two budget reconciliation bills this month -- one that would cut $35 billion in entitlement spending, including $10 billion from Medicaid, and one that would cut $70 billion in taxes. Katrina has certainly delayed and may yet scramble the prospects of those bills passing, but so far, Republican leaders remain committed to the Medicaid reductions and are considering adding further tax cuts. From subscription-only CQ:

Republican leaders are maintaining their support for a $70 billion package of tax cut extensions and may add tax cuts aimed at stimulating rebuilding on the Gulf Coast ...

Frist dropped a plan to vote Tuesday night on legislation that would permanently repeal the estate tax (HR 8). But top Republicans, including Gregg, argue the tax cut extensions will help stimulate the economy and should stay on track.

There could be some real fights over these issues up ahead.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE WATER-CARRIERS. Good for The Hill for actually putting in the small effort to expose and debunk a source’s dishonest quote, right in the text of an article:

Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.) said, “Local and state officials were totally unprepared. Governor Blanco was all but AWOL. Only at President Bush’s urging did she declare a state of emergency,” he said.

In fact, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D) requested a declaration Aug. 26, two days before the hurricane struck her state.

And, of course, shame on Congressman Feeney for eagerly joining in on the smears pushed by the president’s water-carriers.

--Sam Rosenfeld

W ON THE STAND? From a piece in today’s New York Times, here’s something I certainly hadn’t heard mentioned before as a possibility. It’s almost beyond imagining:

There will be at least two sets of Congressional hearings, leaders said, beginning as early as next week, to examine issues like failures in the command and control structure, shortcomings in the evacuation plan for New Orleans, and any organizational problems that may have contributed to the slow response.

The hearings will also address whether the government missed critical opportunities to shore up the levees in New Orleans and whether planning for future disasters is sufficient.

Lawmakers, at least in the Senate, said it would be too early to consider whether Mr. Bush would be called to testify.

It seems obviously and exceedingly unlikely that congressional Republicans would ever be willing to haul the president before their panels; it probably goes without saying that, were such an event to take place, it would signify that Katrina really had precipitated a genuine political crisis for this administration.

For now, the political dynamics in the Hill are wildly unsettled and it’s too soon to draw conclusions about the trajectories of the fights to come. But it’s perhaps a telling sign of the fractures among Republicans that, as is made clear in both the Times piece and today’s Washington Post rundown, both Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay are not hiding their surprise and disapproval over House Government Reform Committee chair Tom Davis’ announced plan to hold hearings soon on the federal response to Katrina. (Davis’s political agenda for the hearings remains perhaps a bit ambiguous, but it’s significant in itself that he’s making any such move without the approval of the leadership.)

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: CASTAWAYS AND CUTS. The poor suffer disproportionately in catastrophes -- just as they do every other day of the year. Matthew Yglesias recounts the litany of anti-poverty programs this administration has curtailed, and points to signs that things may eventually change for the better.

--The Editors

THE MAYHEM RUMOR-MILL. Matt Welch has a good piece up on Reason’s site about the possible consequences of the lurid, racially tinged, and completely out-of-control rumor-mongering surrounding looting and mayhem in Louisiana last week. No one was able to escape the deluge, of course, but it was as wearying as it was unsurprising to see some conservative commentators proving especially eager to wallow in the muck of unsubstantiated tales of “unspeakable urban ultra-violence, perpetuated by the overwhelmingly black population” stranded in New Orleans.

That disorder and mayhem have been facts on the ground there is not in doubt, but a massive amount of false reports and outlandish speculation has just as clearly also characterized the scene and the coverage. And this is an old, old American story.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHY IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL WOULD BE A DISASTER. I popped into the New America Foundation's Terrorism, Security, and America's Purpose conference over at the Capitol Hilton to hear Wesley Clark's speech, "Reflecting on 9-11 and America's Global Engagement Problem." Readers of The Washington Post will recall Clark's op-ed two weeks ago, in which he briefly argued that "it would also be a mistake to pull out [of Iraq] now, or to start pulling out or to set a date certain for pulling out," before moving on to the steps he thinks necessary for a change of direction.

Listening to Clark speaking it was clear that his time as a presidential candidate has left him much savvier about how the American public gets its information -- from headlines, the first paragraphs of newspaper stories, and the first two minutes of the evening news, as he put it -- but that Clark remains, at heart, a military man whose major commitment is to what he thinks is in America's best interests, rather than to partisan politics. It was also clear that the gap between the so-called strategic class and the Democratic base when it comes to the question of withdrawing from Iraq is one that won't vanish any time soon. Clark laid out, in the Q & A session, the best case against immediate withdrawal I've yet heard, and laid it out in nuts-and-bolts operational terms. It's a scenario that those who back immediate withdrawal would do well to consider.

"It'll be a fighting withdrawal," Clark said. "I can see a long and bloody retreat." Men and women in Humvees and dumptrucks will be pursued in retreat, and be left wondering whether they should fire back or not, the war being over. Withdrawal would take four or five weeks, at a minimum, and be "longer and more bloody if you do it in stages."

After the United States withdraws, "the insurgents will say they won" and that "claim will be disputed by al-Qaeda." American sympathizers will become targets of revenge by various militias, leading to the persecution and/or murder of up to a million people -- anyone who's ever talked to an American.

"The political process will begin to come apart." There will be "a pretty rapid recourse not just to civil war but to regional conflict." Iran and other regional actors, such as Turkey, may get pulled into the fray. American prestige and legitimacy will be diminished, and the region left behind will descend into chaos.

It's a pretty dystopian vision -- but if anyone knows from the brutality of man and the difficulty of maintaining a peace, it would be Clark, after his experience with the vengeful and warring ethnic groups in the Balkans. "There is a middle ground, a better ground, to staying the course or withdrawal," Clark said, urging the assembled to consider it. "There's a better course ... It's not yet too late."

Those liberal hawks who backed the invasion of Iraq and now back immediate withdrawal need to ask themselves if they are not, in fact, overcompensating for past errors, and whether the dystopian scenario outlined above is really and truly the best of all possible options. Or are there strong reasons for believing the above scenario will not occur, or will not redound to America's harm if it does?

After his speech I asked Clark what he thought about the fact that such a large portion of the Democratic base now favors immediate withdrawal. "I think the president better pay attention," he replied. "I think he's in danger of losing support for his policies in Iraq."

It was pretty clear from listening to Clark that he thinks that losing the support of America for the war can be counted as another one of the administration's errors in fighting it. That said, it really is possible that there are ways of getting out of Iraq that are superior to others, and also ways that make both America's long-term security and the situation on the ground even worse than the war is making them on its own. Clark sees immediate withdrawal as the latter.

Given that Clark had a pretty clear-headed view going into the war of what operational realities might be like -- just reread this 2002 USA Today op-ed if you want an example -- it might also be wise to listen to him now.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. What are international newspapers saying about America's crisis? Julia Gronnevet rounds up the latest coverage around the globe.

--The Editors

THE PROBLEM IS THE SOLUTION. Kevin Drum lays out the emerging lines of right-wing blame deflection in the service of defending George W. Bush and the feds for last week’s Katrina response effort; it seems clear that the pin-it-on-the-locals defense will become the central narrative here, with smatterings of the other excuses dabbled on for some extra obfuscation.

But there is likely now a more fundamental approach being implemented by the Bush team, one which they have employed masterfully throughout his presidency, and elements of which have been highlighted by some observers recently. There is, first, the classic self-perpetuating conservative strategy for discrediting government -- mismanaging and underfunding public services and then reaping political gain from the resultant anti-government sentiment -- which, as Robert Farley recently observed, will now be used in the service of extracting Bush from the chain of responsibility for last week’s failures. Underlying this particular maneuver, moreover, is the most fundamental Bush strategy of all, which Mark Schmitt described very perceptively today:

It's simply a fact of human nature that people have an easier time believing the thing that makes them feel a little more comfortable and secure in their previous assumptions and their trust…

And that's a fact about public opinion that I believe Bush and Rove understand better than anyone. Whether they learned it only after Sept. 11, or knew it all along (the interview with fired Bush ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that came out right before the election suggests that Bush had an early instinct that what he calls "political capital" could be created not just by persuasion, but by creating extreme situations -- notably war -- in which people essentially have no choice but to defer their trust to the president), they know it now.

And this is part of the story of the Bush presidency: at each point they have created situations in which to believe the worst about the president requires a difficult and unsettling surrender of your own assumptions and sense of security.

We see both of these strands coming together in the P.R. resuscitation campaign now fully underway, with, as Dan Froomkin notes, the Bush team offering up “multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like” and “extensive use of Air Force One” to illustrate our president now firmly in command and taking action. And what’s the president taking action against? Cue the Associated Press:

Bush also announced he is sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help determine whether the government is doing all that it can.

"Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people," the president said after a meeting at the White House with his Cabinet on storm recovery efforts.

And thus does government bureaucracy itself, abstracted from the actual officials in charge of it at the federal level, join the dastardly state and local Louisiana agencies in the roster of offenders.

That’s the Bush approach in a nutshell -- make messes, then take credit for boldly tackling those messes. Exacerbate crises, and then expend maximum effort to reap the political rewards that are inherent to occupying the office to which the public instinctively turns in times of such crisis.

--Sam Rosenfeld

PLUTOCRACY FOR ANOTHER DAY. Bill Frist did the only politically feasible thing late yesterday and announced that a Senate vote on repealing the estate tax, originally scheduled for today, will be postponed indefinitely so that Congress can focus on Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and reforms to federal disaster response policy. It will be worth paying close attention, however, to some of the measures that Republicans might consider attaching to Katrina-related bills, as subscription-only Roll Call reports today:

Last week, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) suggested that Congress may well need to pass an economic stimulus package, complete with tax cuts, in order to ensure that Katrina’s effects on gas prices and other commodities do not drag down the entire U.S. economy. That sentiment was echoed by Frist. Republicans have also floated a revamped energy bill that could more immediately deal with rising gas prices, to supplement the measure Congress passed at the end of July.

Blunt's statements should prick everyone's ears and gird Democrats for coming legislative fights.

As for the estate tax vote, the piece indicates that Democrats actually would have managed to filibuster the repeal had Frist not relented:

Even if Frist had decided to move forward with the estate tax in the absence of fresh legislation dealing with the hurricane disaster, Democrats were prepared to temporarily filibuster the estate tax bill today, said Jim Manley, spokesman for Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Though many Democrats were originally expected to support the bill, Reid rallied his troops to oppose going to the measure by making the case that Congress should be trying to help the victims of Katrina instead.

One really, really wishes that using a massive humanitarian catastrophe to cajole Democrats into temporarily withholding their support for an obscenely illiberal and reckless tax giveaway did not have to count as an impressive feat of party whipping, but, alas, such is the state of things. Manley is also quoted indicating that the circumstances might compel Democrats to block the GOP’s planned $10 billion cuts in Medicaid funding, which would be nice. But meanwhile, where are the rest of the Democrats on the proposal sponsored by Jerry Nadler and three other House Dems to shield Katrina’s victims from the punitive new bankruptcy reforms? Where are the Democratic senators announcing their sponsorship of a Senate version of the bill?

--Sam Rosenfeld

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: THE OTHER LEGACY. The continuing general inequality between blacks and whites in America was highlighted last week in New Orleans. It's a fitting backdrop for William Rehnquist's death, in a way: As Michael Tomasky argues, Rehnquist never did see a need for federal remedies to the consequences of past discrimination.

--The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: A BRANCH MORE DANGEROUS. William Rehnquist came to the Supreme Court as a champion of judicial restraint. So how is it that the Court is as activist as ever? Deborah Pearlstein review the history of the Rehnquist Court.

--The Editors

JUST POSTED ON TAP ONLINE: BIG EASY, HARD TRUTHS. Chris Mooney reflects on growing up in New Orleans without ever quite trusting it.

--The Editors