Continuing the Blame Game

On Thursday, Reinhard continued ignoring the President's public acceptance of responsibility for the Katrina response. His "knee-jerk defense" (his own words) is further proof he does not watch the news, but only parrots the most recent RNC talking points. Apparently they hadn't been updated yet.

Read his latest crap here


Reinhard spends the article lambasting local officials. He starts by just being mean. "She had spent a week watching her hometown become a dead zone. Maybe she thought this was endearing," he says of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA. He calls her "a pit bull with lipstick."

RNC Rule #1-Demonize the enemy.

The latest exercise of retardation is the right-wing excoriation of buses left in the water, when they could have been evacuating people. Gee, that sounds like a great idea. And if FEMA had a competent director, he may have used federal authority to put together just such a program. The Mayor, dealing with evacuating his staff, his city bureaucracy, and his family, should have thought about it first, though, right, David? That silly mayor, trumpeting about how the administration didnt help, when he didnt even use his own buses.

Note: he was in the middle of a flood. The levees broke. He ordered an evacuation, but this is not his stock in trade. It is SUPPOSED to be FEMA's stock in trade.

Now, a mayor not thinking of this obvious solution for evacuation is excusable; it is like having a politician not know the difference between thoroughbred horses. But when an expert in evacuations does not think of it, that is the problem.

Reinhard goes own to detail a conversation on TV that Sen. Landrieu held, when she was asked about the buses. Shame on a Senator for expecting a disaster management agency to handle those things. Reinhard then states:

"She then went on to pinpoint the specific problem: "This administration did not believe in mass transit.""

So, she brought in a corollary point, that buses were underfunded and not a high priority, because there were few federal funding opportunities for mass transit. (All the money was going to rich men like Reinhard and Stickel.)

But notice what Reinhard does: he makes it seem as if Landrieu used this as the culmination of her argument, and was trying to prove that the reason that the buses were not used was directly linked to Bush's lack of funding for mass transit.

This is a patently absurd argument, which is precisely why Reinhard made it look this way. He wanted the reader to assume that this was the culmination of Landrieu's argument, when it was only a minor point. He says:

"Yes, if the Bush administration had only chipped in for light rail, subways, streetcars and buses, New Orleans officials would have been fine when Hurricane Katrina hit and on sunny days, to boot."

RNC Rule #2: Put words in the mouths of your enemy.

He continues:

"A bit later she intoned, "Now is not the time for finger-pointing" -- and then proceeded to point exclusively at the Bush administration for Katrina's devastation of Louisiana."

Meanwhile, Reinhard has done the exact same thing, writing an entire editorial attempting to connect one failed tactic of evacuation to the wholesale failure of the state and local governments, and saying "There were obvious federal foul-ups. Our homeland-security system and federal-system mechanisms seemed to fail." Seemed to?

FEMA is the culprit in this entire failure, and Reinhard is not interested in admitting this. He is only interested in shifting the blame (see his earlier article on why playing the blame game is inappropriate). Uninterested in the truth, Reinhard is only a shill for his party.

How long will the Oregonian continue employing this partisan hack?