Dubya - Son of a Bilandic

I'm still stewing about the newly discovered answers to the question, "What did the President know about Katrina, and when did he know it?" I was going to channel my fury into a post about the political fortunes of Michael Bilandic, the mayor of Chicago who was booted from office after callously mismanaging the city's response to a huge snowstorm in January 1979. Turns out that I don't have to: the blogger behind Rightwing Nuthouse has more or less done this already for me, and all the better, tied Bilandic to Bush.

Thing is, though, he tries to separate Bush from (the Democrat) Bilandic, arguing "that quite simply, no government on earth could have been prepared in any way, shape or form for the mammoth problems faced by city, state, and federal officials in the aftermath of Katrina. You can plan until you’re blue in the face but what faced government officials starting on Tuesday afternoon was something never before confronted by any government anywhere."

You can't spell "feeble argument" without FEMA, can you? To a large extent, governments exist to handle big events, from raising massive armies or taxing huge territories to dealing with natural disasters like Katrina or man-made ones like Iraq. And as the new video - on which Rightwing Nuthouse also comments - show, FEMA was weakly attempting to "confront" the disaster, but got little guidance from Dubya, the decisivist cowboy of them all.