I’m really bothered by the sing-song “blame-game” tossed about by the Right. There is, indeed, blame here. I was recently lectured by someone about other people’s failure to accept “personal responsibility.” Oh, like “the buck stops here”?

Bush seemed so inept not because he was on vacation but because Cheney and Rove were on vacation. Now we see “Bush’s brain” back on the attack.

Standing in a warehouse, Bush’s arms stuck out from his sides as if he were a weightlifter; he moved as if recovering from a stroke.

I saw Bush at a cabinet meeting explaining “we’ll solve these problems because that’s what we are — problem solvers.” And articulate, too. mjh

Parties Scramble for Post-Katrina Leverage
Hill GOP Sets Investigative Commission; Democrats Criticize Panel’s Makeup
By Charles Babington and Shailagh Murray

House and Senate GOP leaders announced the “Hurricane Katrina Joint Review Committee,” which will include only members of Congress, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats by a yet-to-be-determined ratio. The commission, which will have subpoena powers, will investigate the actions of local, state and federal governments before and after the storm that devastated New Orleans and other portions of the Gulf Coast.

They rejected Democratic appeals to model the panel after the Sept. 11 commission, which was made up of non-lawmakers and was equally balanced between Republicans and Democrats. That commission won wide praise for assessing how the 2001 terrorist attacks occurred, and for recommending changes in the government’s anti-terrorism structure. …

A Republican-led Congress cannot be trusted to make a thorough investigation of a Republican administration, said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). “Democrats strongly prefer that the response to Hurricane Katrina be investigated by a commission of independent experts like the 9/11 commission,” he said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the new commission “is not truly bipartisan, will not be made up of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, cannot write legislation and will not have bipartisan subpoena power.”

Bush Requests $51.8 Billion More for Relief
GOP Leaders Launch Inquiry on Katrina Preparation and Response
By Jonathan Weisman and Amy Goldstein

“While countless Americans are pulling together to lend a helping hand, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pointing fingers in a shameless effort to tear us apart,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman responded.

[mjh: I hear Mrs Lovejoy crying, “think of the children; won’t somebody think of the children?” Somebody should remind Mehlman they won the election through shameless efforts to tear us apart.]

For Bush, a Deepening Divide By Dan Balz

[T]he aftermath of Katrina’s fury charts a clear deterioration in political consensus in the United States and a growing willingness to interpret events through a partisan prism. It is a problem that now appears destined to follow Bush through the final years of his presidency — a clear failure of his 2000 campaign promise to be a “uniter, not a divider.”

A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken last Friday illustrates the point vividly. Just 17 percent of Democrats said they approved of the way Bush was handling the Katrina crisis while 74 percent of Republicans said they approved. About two in three Republicans rated the federal government’s response as good or excellent, while two in three Democrats rated it not so good or poor.

The ‘Stuff Happens’ Presidency By Harold Meyerson

Even if we’ll never win the national-greatness sweepstakes for solidarity, though, we’ve long been the model of the world in matters infrastructural, in roads, bridges and dams and the like. But the America in which Eisenhower the Good decreed the construction of the interstate highway system now seems a far-off land in which even conservatives believed in public expenditures for the public good. The radical-capitalist conservatives of the past quarter-century not only haven’t supported the public expenditures, they don’t even believe there is such a thing as the public good. Let the Dutch build their dikes through some socialistic scheme of taxing and spending; that isn’t the American way. Here, the business of government is to let the private sector create wealth — even if that wealth doesn’t circulate where it’s most needed. So George W. Bush threw trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, and what did they do with it? Did the Walton family up in Bentonville raise the levees in New Orleans? Did the Bass family over in Texas write a tax-deductible check to the Mennonites for the billions of dollars they would need to rescue the elderly from inundated nursing homes?

[mjh- re: that last point, read on…]

Wal-Mart at Forefront of Hurricane Relief

By Michael Barbaro and Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 6, 2005; Page D01

At 8 a.m. on Wednesday, as New Orleans filled with water, Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. called an emergency meeting of his top lieutenants and warned them he did not want a “measured response” to the hurricane.

“I want us to respond in a way appropriate to our size and the impact we can have,” he said, according to an executive who attended the meeting. At the time, Wal-Mart had pledged $2 million to the relief efforts. “Should it be $10 million?” Scott asked.

Over the next few days, Wal-Mart’s response to Katrina — an unrivaled $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers — has turned the chain into an unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast and earned it near-universal praise at a time when the company is struggling to burnish its image. …

Wal-Mart has much to gain though its conspicuous largesse — it has hundreds of stores in Gulf Coast states and an image problem across the country — but even those who have criticized the company in the past are impressed.