The Washington Post:

A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, an indictment that could force him to step down as House majority leader.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The New York Times reviews George Clooney’s new film, Good Night, and Good Luck:

Burnishing the legend of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who in the 1940’s and 50’s established a standard of journalistic integrity his profession has scrambled to live up to ever since, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a passionate, thoughtful essay on power, truth-telling and responsibility. It opens the New York Film Festival tonight and will be released nationally on Oct. 7. The title evokes Murrow’s trademark sign-off, and I can best sum up my own response by recalling the name of his flagship program: See it now.

And be prepared to pay attention. “Good Night, and Good Luck” is not the kind of historical picture that dumbs down its material, or walks you carefully through events that may be unfamiliar. Instead, it unfolds, cinéma-vérité style, in the fast, sometimes frantic present tense, following Murrow and his colleagues as they deal with the petty annoyances and larger anxieties of news gathering at a moment of political turmoil. The story flashes back from a famous, cautionary speech that Murrow gave at an industry convention in 1958 to one of the most notable episodes in his career — his war of words and images with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

You can’t say the Bush Administration isn’t providing bold leadership. When a federal prosecutor started poking around in Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s business, The Bush Justice Department sprung into action and demoted him:

The Justice Department’s inspector general and the F.B.I. are looking into the demotion of a veteran federal prosecutor whose reassignment nearly three years ago shut down a criminal investigation of the Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, current and former department officials report.

They said investigators had questioned whether the demotion of the prosecutor, Frederick A. Black, in November 2002 was related to his alert to Justice Department officials days earlier that he was investigating Mr. Abramoff. The lobbyist is a major Republican Party fund-raiser and a close friend of several Congressional leaders.

Colleagues said the demotion of Mr. Black, the acting United States attorney in Guam, and a subsequent order barring him from pursuing public corruption cases brought an end to his inquiry into Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying work for some Guam judges.

Public corruption is business as usual in the Bush Administration.

From this evening’s CBS News:

CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports that Michael Brown, who recently resigned as the head of the FEMA, has been rehired by the agency as a consultant to evaluate its response following Hurricane Katrina.

I think Bush misses his lightning rod. Those lightning bolts have been landing a little close, lately.

I’m sure Brownie will do a heckuva job.

Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart on the sixties spy comedy Get Smart, has died. He was 82 years old.

Get Smart has never been released on DVD, but Amazon.com is collecting email addresses of customers interested in the series.

If you’re a huge fan of the Beach Boys, and you’d like to get a phone call from Brian Wilson, here’s your chance:

Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson has been personally telephoning fans who pledge more than $100 … to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

…

[Wilson] will also match donations of more than $100 until 1 October, with money going to the American Red Cross.

You can find details at Wilson’s website, www.brianwilson.com.

When a disaster stirs a wave of charitable giving, I worry about scams disguised as legitimate charities. This offer seems difficult to validate through traditional methods. The news story is from the BBC, and Brian Wilson’s own considerable reputation is on the line. I believe the offer is genuine.

You didn’t believe me, did you? Back in June, when I said Kate Bush was releasing a new album, you didn’t believe me. After all, it’s been twelve years since her last album, The Red Shoes.

Well, here is katebush.com, with a tiny Flash animation, and a short audio snippet of a new song called “King of the Mountain.” The new album, called Aerial, is coming out in the U.S. on November 8.

Rosabel, believe.

Small-town hick, while W.C. Fields shuffles the cards: Is this a game of chance?

W.C. Fields: Not the way I play it, no.

— from My Little Chickadee

After Hurricane Katrina, after he saw the DVD with the images of suffering in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, after he saw his sagging poll numbers, George W. Bush made a televised speech in New Orleans. For what may have been the first time, he acknowledged the presence of “deep, persistent poverty” in America. He acknowledged the history of racism that has done so much to shape the face of American poverty. He promised “to confront this poverty with bold action.” He pledged to “do what it takes” to rebuild the region, better than ever. Some have called Bush’s reconstruction plan a “conservative New Deal,” after President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was not a carefully-calibrated set of federal programs; it was a desperate set of experiments, trying anything that might get the economy moving and people working once again. The guiding principle was, try lots of stuff. If something works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it.

Bush’s New Deal doesn’t start with the same blank slate. Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, has been put in charge:

Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.

That is Rove’s hallmark.

Another Rove hallmark is the Blame Game — he’s always setting someone up to take the blame for every Bush administration screw-up. The Justice Department is on a fishing expedition, trying to blame the failure of the New Orleans levees on environmentalists:

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys’ offices: “Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.”

What does a conservative New Deal look like? Well, it has no-bid contracts for Halliburton. It eliminates prevailing-wage protection for workers in the afflicted area. It has “enterprise zones,” areas with special tax breaks for business development, “temporary exemptions” from environmental laws and estate taxes, and more. From the Wall Street Journal:

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson:

Problem is, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta have been designated enterprise zones for a decade now, and they’re still just about the poorest places in the United States. Right-wingers have railed for 40 years now at the failures, real and imagined, of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, but Johnson’s policies, and those of Franklin Roosevelt before him, have been far more successful at reducing poverty than those that presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush promoted during their terms in office. Indeed, poverty has risen steadily during the current Bush’s presidency, and median household income has declined for each of the past five years, though for the past three years the economy has been in recovery.

If it doesn’t work, do more of it?

The conservative New Deal helps the rich first. It has big tax cuts for casino operators, with the costs offset by more IRS audits of poor taxpayers and cuts to lots of social safety-net programs.

So we listen to George W. Bush’s promises and wonder: in the conservative New Deal, do poor people have a chance?

Not the way Bush plays it, no.

The New York Times belittles the concerns of TiVo users:

FALSE ALARM There was a short panic in blogland this week after someone wrote to the keeper of the PVRBlog to warn that his TiVo box had informed him that an episode of “The Simpsons” that he wanted to save was “flagged” by copy protection software — the episode would self-destruct at a certain date.

Reporters from CNET and elsewhere quickly determined that the flag was just a software bug, but some TiVo devotees remain convinced that they may soon be unable to save their favorite shows. Sure, it was just a bug, writes Matt Haughey of the PVRBlog, but it “demonstrates what could very well happen in the near future with TiVos and other sorts of P.V.R. devices.” Once the ire is worked up, it’s hard to just let it go.

The Times writer totally misses the point. The “bug” revealed a secret: that the TiVo box includes code designed to take control of recorded programs away from the user.

The “bug” was a programming accident. The anti-user capability it revealed is no accident, but a deliberate feature of the TiVo software, programmed at some considerable expense and effort. It was put in there to be used. You may rest assured, it will be used. Personally, I think that’s worth getting “worked up” over.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum’s mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of “compassionate conservatism,” the lack of concern for the “underprivileged” his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

From Monday, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert:

The president is Lucy, and he’s holding a football. We’re Charlie Brown.

…

The country has put its faith in Mr. Bush many times before, and come up empty. It may be cynical, but my guess is that if we believe him again this time, we’re going to end up on our collective keisters, just like Charlie Brown, who could never stop himself from kicking mightily at empty space, which was all that was left each time Lucy snatched the ball away.

…

Not only was he proposing a Gulf Coast Marshall Plan, but he was declaring, in words that made his conservative followers gasp, that poverty in the U.S. “has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.”

If you were listening to the radio, you might have thought you were hearing the ghost of Lyndon Johnson. “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action,” said Mr. Bush.

He was being Lucy again, enticing us with the football. But before we commence kicking the air, consider the facts.

This president has had zero interest in attacking poverty, and the result has been an increase in poverty in the U.S., the richest country in the world, in each of the last four years. Instead of attacking poverty, the Bush administration has attacked the safety net and has stubbornly refused to stop the decline in the value of the minimum wage on his watch.

You can believe that he’s suddenly worried about poor people if you want to. What is more likely is that his reference to racism and poverty was just another opportunistic Karl Rove moment, never to be acted upon.

Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally, once asked how often someone could be fooled with the same trick. She answered her own question: “Pretty often, huh?”

Pretty often, yeah. But not this time.

Once upon a time, I wanted to become a journalist. One of my role models was Edward R. Murrow, a CBS reporter whose live radio reports from wartime London brought the early days of World War II home to Americans. His television shows in the 1950s helped shape the nature of broadcast journalism. He set the bar high.

Murrow made a career of confronting liars and exposing lies. His career is the stuff of legend. One of the most legendary — and most inspiring — episodes was his 1953 confrontation with Senator Joe McCarthy, the man for whom McCarthyism was named.

So, I’m looking forward to seeing George Clooney’s new movie, Good Night and Good Luck. It won’t be in theaters until October 7, and I’m champing at the bit.

David Carr of the New York Times has a preview:

“Good Night” is about journalism, not as a subject of parody, but of inquiry. With various reporters and news anchors splashing into fetid waters to save victims of Hurricane Katrina, “Good Night” serves as a reminder that it may take a different kind of journalistic courage, a willingness to risk career and more, to bring government to account. At a time when the news media are being denied access to everything from pictures of imprisoned foreign nationals to critical government security documents, Mr. Clooney, without pressing the analogy, has made a movie that reminds that government needs a vigorous, even oppositional press to find its best nature.

Like Murrow’s reports, the $8 million film, distributed by Warner Independent Pictures, uses McCarthy’s own words to demonstrate that his stated effort to save the United States from Communist infiltration was itself a far more insidious threat.…

In “Good Night,” David Strathairn renders Murrow as a reluctant hero, and a twitchy, dark one at that. His Murrow, with the fatalism of Eeyore, is a journalist who reflexively expects the worst, but responds by doing his best, steeling those around him even as McCarthy’s gun sights are trained on his forehead.

In the movie, McCarthy is shown only in archival footage. Director Clooney thought no actor could do him justice. Modern audiences who have never seen this man, once one of the most powerful men in the U.S. government, are in for a shock.

Mr. Clooney has an odd relationship with the press — he reveres its role, but has been a victim of some of its less noble reflexes.…

“In this and all the rest of journalism, I think the issues are complicated,” he said. “I don’t think that there are truly bad guys or truly good guys.… There is always a split in these things, but hopefully the need for entertainment does not push news off the screen.”

Murrow said as much in a famous speech he gave at the Radio-Television News Directors Association annual meeting in 1958. Part of the speech, a reminder that television should and could produce important journalism, closes the film:

“To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: there is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose?

“Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

The movie’s trailer is available, in several formats, here.

They turned on the power last week in parts of New Orleans. They used it to light Jackson Square with a garish light, as a backdrop for a televised speech by George W. Bush. Many observers thought it looked like something from Disneyland.

Bush promised to “do what it takes” to rebuild the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina:

Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know: There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.

The next day, he ruled out taxes to pay for the reconstruction.

The New Orleans of the future, he promised, would be better than the city that was destroyed:

When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm.

Better how? Well, one vision of Neo Orleans calls for “fewer poor people.” And maybe we could replace all those jazz musicians with animatronic musical bears from Disneyland.

A couple hours after Bush finished his speech, electrical power to the city was shut off again. That’s show biz.

Some stuff is so complicated that only comedians truly understand it. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart discussed the financing of the Bush recovery plan for Hurricane Katrina with “Daily Show Chief Fiscal Policy Analyst” Rob Corddry:

Corddry: Everything the president is doing is perfectly in keeping with the conservative ideal of limited government.

Stewart: How is what the president is doing limited government?

Corddry: This president believes government should be limited not in size, Jon, but in effectiveness. Now in terms of effectiveness, this is the most limited administration we’ve ever had.

Stewart: Rob, let’s stay with the financial part of this. How is his record spending conservative?

Corddry: Because it’s paid for through supply-side economics. It’s a faith-based accounting approach.

Stewart: Supply-side economics? How does that even apply to this?

Corddry: Wow — sounds like someone’s unfamiliar with the work of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Simply put, Jon, supply-side economics is when a president cuts taxes. This makes people happy, and him popular. The tax cuts deprive the government of money, and after eight years the deficit balloons to astronomical size.

Then, with the economy in tatters, a Democrat is elected. He has to cut the deficit by raising taxes, making people unhappy, and him unpopular, perfectly setting up the next election, where a Republican uses the Democrats’ tax hike against them to win back the White House and start the cycle all over again.

Four men won Nobel Prizes for that, Jon.

Bill Maher on evil:

Exorcism … is a popular theme nowadays because it reinforces the comforting notion that evil resides outside of us. Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.

…

Is George Bush purely evil? Of course not. And that’s what’s so evil about him. He doesn’t twirl a mustache and smirk and cackle — well, he doesn’t twirl a mustache. He’s like the Peanuts character Pigpen. Wherever he goes, he stirs up such a humongous mess it can only be cleaned up by Halliburton.

But he’s not pure evil, because evil is a chain.

Did any one person doom New Orleans? No. It’s a chain. People vote for a corrupt leader. A corrupt leader puts unqualified cronies in high places, and when those cronies f*** up, evil gets done. The devil didn’t fly up from Hell and knock a hole in that levee. The levee just didn’t get built, because the money for it went to rich people’s tax cuts, and pork projects, and corporate welfare.

…

This week an ailing American bald eagle was found to be dying from mercury poisoning. (Republicans immediately tried to blame it on the eagle’s lifestyle choices.) But it’s worth noting that, also this week, the White House threatened to veto limits on mercury pollution.

Now, pure evil would be if George Bush sat around the White House saying, “Let’s poison eagles,” and even I don’t believe George Bush would do that. Cheney would do that. And even he is not pure evil. Dick Cheney doesn’t hate poor children and caribou. They’re just in the way.

I just watched a remarkable movie called Downfall. It’s about the final days of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.

One thing that makes it remarkable is that it was made by German filmmakers. While Alec Guinness and Anthony Hopkins portrayed Hitler in his bunker decades ago, many Germans preferred to treat the whole Nazi era as nothing more than a bad dream. Even now, Downfall is controversial in Germany. Critics complain that the film shows Hitler and his close companions as human beings.

The filmmakers say that’s just the point: the Nazis did not have horns or tails or cloven hooves. They were human beings just like us, and that’s the scary thing.

Downfall shows that Hitler thought himself infallible. He ignored advice from his generals. He ignored facts that didn’t fit his fanciful view of the situation. When his ill-considered orders didn’t work, he accused his officers of disloyalty rather than endure criticism of his plans. He fired, and sometimes executed, those who dared to stand their ground when he was wrong. As the Russians closed in on Berlin, he declared that they were falling into his trap, and would be destroyed by a massive pincer movement — by two German army groups that had already been wiped out.

A handful of those around him shared his delusions. More understood the true situation, but did nothing and said nothing. They were Hitler’s men, and they would drag the whole country down with them before they would contradict their leader.

Human nature doesn’t change. We must struggle today against the same dark tendencies within us that the Nazis allowed to govern their lives. We must not place our trust in deluded leaders, nor in those who turn their backs on truth and sign on to their leader’s happy delusions.

In the past, I have often quoted New York Times columnists and linked to their columns online. Effective today, the Times website has moved most of its columnists to a new pay-only area called “TimesSelect.”

Because I have the newspaper delivered at home, I have access to TimesSelect content online. However, links to that content won’t work for anyone who doesn’t have TimesSelect access. This poses a dilemma.

When I link to Times columnists, I usually try to quote enough material to make the point, but the columnist’s ideas are always more fully developed in the full piece than in any extract. A link also allows readers to verify that I’m not putting words into someone’s mouth by checking the source. The new Times policy cripples those links.

For the time being, however, I will continue to quote Times columnists and link to their online columns. Paid members of TimesSelect will be able to check my source and read the full columns. Other readers, I hope, will not be too greatly inconvenienced.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling uncovers the secret origin of Judge John Roberts. (Click to get a “site pass.” After you see an advertisement, you’ll have full access to the site for one day.)

• Episode 1: Infant Strict Constructionist
• Episode 2: Education of a Conservative

Cartoonist Ward Sutton looks behind the smile.

Al Franken talking with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science:

Franken: This is Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s phrase: biostitutes. And these are guys who are scientists who are for hire…. And they will go in, and for enough money, declare that global warming is just, “It’s an open question as to whether it’s happening.” … And they’ll turn out a good two or three page report. And people in the media will get it, and then they’ll get the peer-reviewed study which is 1200 pages long. And they’ll go like … “I guess there’s an open question as to whether global warming’s really happening.”

Mooney: The press is definitely part of the problem on some of these issues.

Franken: Would you say laziness?

Mooney: Yeah, or just — it’s part of the institutional culture, as well: the “he said, she said, we’re clueless.” On the coverage, I mean. That’s what I call it.

Franken: Wait — he said, she said, we’re clueless?

Mooney: Yeah. “We’re” being the journalists. So they just — they refuse to evaluate the quality of the information. And on some issues, there might be a real scientific debate, right? Depends on the issue. Global warming, no debate. It’s quite clear. Evolution, no debate. It’s quite clear what the scientific point of view is, and there’s people who want to create a controversy for political reasons.

George W. Bush has apparently been kidnapped and replaced by a look-alike:

President Bush on Tuesday said he takes responsibility for the federal government’s failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina.

The kidnappers didn’t do their homework. Nobody’s going to believe their crude substitute is the real George W. Bush.

Okay, so Brownie is out. Resigned.

Under his management, FEMA rejected both pleas for help and offers of help. Even-handed. President Bush gave him a friendly slap on the back and said he was doing a “heckuva job.”

Well, the liberals got all worked up about the people left to die in New Orleans (a city with a strong French influence, by the way, which should tell you something about liberal loyalties).

They couldn’t attack President Bush. He had given up a couple vacation days. He had flown over the city in his big jet plane and looked out the window. He certainly could not be faulted. So the liberals focused on Brownie. Typical.

Brownie had come to FEMA with no previous emergency management experience, they said. His law degree was from an unaccredited law school. His résumé (French word) was full of distortions and outright lies, Time magazine reported. Liberals hinted that the Bush Administration had never bothered to check, ignoring the possibility that Brownie’s creative approach to facts was the very reason he was hired.

The liberals are always doing this. People neglected and dying in New Orleans? Blame Brownie. White House ignored August 2001 warning that Bin Laden planned attacks inside the U.S.? Blame National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, now Secretary of State. Bin Laden allowed to escape at Tora Bora? Blame Gen. Tommy Franks (retired), now the proud recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Iraq not a cake walk? Blame Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank. No WMDs in Iraq? Blame CIA director George Tenet (retired), another recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Civil order breaks down in Iraq after the defeat of the Iraqi army? Blame Paul Bremer, another retiree with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Long-time allies turn against us? Blame Colin Powell. Torture at Abu Ghraib? Blame Rummy, or maybe White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, now Attorney General and possible Supreme Court nominee.

I could go on and on. You’ll notice the liberals never go after President Bush himself. He is the very model of competence and caring. Can he help it that he’s surrounded by all these screw-ups?

President Bush doesn’t let himself get distracted by these petty matters. He’s a Big Picture president with his eyes on the prize. Why, I’ll bet he’s already planning out how he’ll make up those two missed vacation days.

A four-year-old post from a site for funny Macintosh news, As the Apple Turns: Look! Good fortune is around you.

Someday, some Hollywood genius will make a big movie — like Titanic, perhaps — set against the terrorist attacks that took place four years ago today. And, to set a properly ominous mood, the filmmaker will fill the sky with dark storm clouds and rumbles of thunder. Audiences and critics will rave about how the filmmakers brought a half-forgotten historical tragedy to life.

But if I’m there, I will remember. The sky was blue. A brilliant, cloudless blue, the same here as it was in New York and Washington, D.C.

When the FAA ordered a “full ground stop,” the mandatory grounding of all civilian planes, I went outside with some of my co-workers and watched planes approaching the airport here for their unscheduled landing. There would be no planes in the sky for several days to come.

After the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, Hollywood frantically cut or altered shots of the New York skyline from movies approaching release. Even a fleeting sight of the towers, they reasoned, would stir emotions that would overwhelm the story in any film where they appeared.

Time dulls the ragged edge of grief, and distorts our memory. The twin towers become the Doomed Twin Towers. Like Pearl Harbor, Abe Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and the Titanic itself, we wonder: was there really a time when no one knew what was going to happen? “September 11” has been turned into a political punchline. Was there really a time when it was just another date?

It’s good, I think, to feel some of the pain again. To remember what really happened. To know that it came out of the clear blue sky.

Pretty strong stuff from Bill Maher:

Now, I kid. But seriously, Mr. President, this job can’t be fun for you anymore. There’s no more money to spend. You used up all of that. You can’t start another war, because you also used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people.

Yeah, listen to your mom. The cupboard is bare, the credit card’s maxed out, and no one’s speaking to you. Mission accomplished! Now it’s time to do what you’ve always done best: lose interest and walk away, like you did with your military service, and the oil company, and the baseball team. It’s time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How ’bout cowboy or spaceman?

Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying that there’s so many other things that you, as president, could involve yourself in. Please don’t.

I know, I know — there’s a lot left to do. There’s a war with Venezuela, and eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church, and Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

But, sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You’ve performed so poorly, I’m surprised you haven’t given yourself a medal. You’re a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a sh*tty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes.

On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon, and the city of New Orleans. Maybe you’re just not lucky.

I’m not saying you don’t love this country. I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

So, yes — God does speak to you. And what He’s saying is, “Take a hint.”

Cartoonist Mark Fiore has an animation called Whoopsi Gras, about the comedy of errors that, in the end, wasn’t funny at all.

I thought it was bad when Michael Chertoff tried to shift blame to the disaster’s victims. Then Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania started talking about criminal penalties. (Later, Santorum tried to blame the National Weather Service. We can only hope he soon finds a reliable source for a better grade of crack than he’s been smoking recently.)

When Barbara Bush said things were “working very well” for poor evacuees, I joked that it was “like a great big camp-out.” House Republican Leader Tom DeLay compared the evacuation to camping out, too. He asked three boys at a temporary shelter, “Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?”

Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck calls the hurricane survivors in New Orleans “scumbags,” and manages to get in a shot at the families of 9/11 victims, too.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert would like to bulldoze New Orleans. The Wall Street Journal reported that Rep. Richard Baker of Baton Rouge said, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” (Baker says he was misquoted.)

But some see a bright future for New Orleans. James Reiss, a wealthy resident and city official, was quoted in a Wall Street Journal story:

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” he says. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”

Do you suppose that the way we’ll get “fewer poor people” is by lifting people out of poverty? No, I didn’t think so, either.

Katrina has certainly unmasked a lot of people.

Years ago, I heard about a great reporter who had a sign above his desk. It said, “GOYAKOD.” When visitors asked what GOYAKOD meant, the reporter explained: “Get off your ass; knock on doors.” That’s what good reporters do.

In recent years, the American news media have seemed to embrace the rather esoteric philosophical notion that the truth is unknowable. So they sat at their anchor desks and let the spin-meisters of the two major political parties go at it on issue after issue, in an endless game of “he said, she said.” They never called a lie a lie, for fear of compromising their aura of know-nothing neutrality.

Then came Hurricane Katrina. Reporters went to the disaster zone, hoping only to capture some good visuals for the nightly news. But they saw with their own eyes that sometimes, at least, the truth is knowable. They sent shock waves through spin-numbed viewers when they challenged lies and platitudes.

The Bush White House must spin clockwise. In the northern hemisphere, a hurricane spins counter-clockwise, and Katrina has nullified the White House spin machine, for the moment. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne on inescapable accountability:

The White House is aghast because it is pulling levers that once worked, and nothing is happening.

To borrow one of [Bill] O’Reilly’s favorite phrases, New Orleans was a “No Spin Zone.” Good, smart, tough and compassionate reporters gave Americans a direct view of the disaster and kept asking, with increasing urgency, why New Orleans was such a mess.

You can tell the White House knows how much trouble it is in — that’s no doubt why Bush had another news conference yesterday — by following the Frank Theorem. “It’s a rule in American politics,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), “that whichever side denounces the other for politicizing the issue is losing the argument.” Bingo.

…

This crisis has been an exceptionally clear lesson in this White House’s overall approach: Try to get everyone to believe that any criticism of the president will blow back on the critics because Americans just don’t like that sort of thing. Attack “finger-pointing,” and make sure your allies madly point fingers at your opponents.

Say no one should play politics with a disaster — and then make sure Republican leaders in Congress set up a commission to investigate the relief effort without asking Democrats for their input on how the investigation should be carried out.

Bush’s critics aren’t backing off, because they’ve been here before. Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who cooperated with Bush in the days after Sept. 11 but lost his South Dakota seat after a long, White House-inspired campaign accusing him of being “obstructionist,” speaks from experience.

“Democrats to this day remain outraged at the blatant efforts that Republicans, especially in the administration, made to undermine the perception of our patriotism and our motivations,” Daschle said in an interview.

This time around, Democrats won’t be waved off by right-wing commentators or by contrived and insincere appeals to national unity. “I don’t think we should pay a whit of attention to administration criticisms,” Daschle said. “Democrats need to ask the hard questions and ignore the political attacks that are destined to come when we ask them.”

The sounds of contention you are hearing are the sounds of accountability in a free republic. The president may not like it, but it is a refreshing sound.

Tim Russert on the Don Imus Show:

We’ve talked to the head of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, who, one year ago, did a simulated computer model — table top exercise — called “Hurricane Pam,” in which they predicted this almost to the letter. And he called FEMA and said, on Saturday or Sunday, “You have to have tent cities set up outside of New Orleans, outside the state. You’re gonna have hundreds of thousands of evacuees. You have to be able to absorb them, or they’re gonna die in the streets.”

And the FEMA said to them, “Americans don’t sleep in tents.”

That is what went wrong, and that’s what we have to find out. Who’s accountable? This notion that we’re all too busy now to look forward, we can’t look back — we can do both. Because to ignore what happened in New Orleans is to guarantee it will happen again.

Bill Maher, last Friday, on his HBO show:

This is what I call unintentional racism. Because that’s the whole thing with the Bush people — they just can’t imagine. “Why don’t you just pack up your Range Rover, grab a case of Poland Spring water out of the garage, and go to your summer home? What is the problem?”

Once again, comedians provide the most penetrating insights into current events. From The Daily Show on Wednesday:

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan: Some just want to engage in the blame game…

George W. Bush: One of the things that people want us to do here is to play a blame game.

George Bush the Elder: To me, the fascination with the blame game…

FEMA boss Michael Brown: You’re not gonna suck me into that blame game.

Jon Stewart: Just a quick observation: When people do not want to play the blame game, they’re to blame!

The Daily Show on Thursday:

Jon Stewart: The president has vowed to personally lead the investigation into the government’s failed response to Katrina. Isn’t that a job perhaps someone else should be doing?

Samantha Bee: No, no, no, no. Not at all, Jon. To truly find out what went wrong, it’s important for an investigator to have a little distance from the situation. And it’s hard to get any more distant from it than the president was last week.

Harold Meyerson:

We’re not number one. We’re not even close.

By which measures, precisely, do we lead the world? Caring for our countrymen? You jest. A first-class physical infrastructure? Tell that to New Orleans. Throwing so much money at the rich that we’ve got nothing left over to promote the general welfare? Now you’re talking.

The problem goes beyond the fact that we can’t count on our government to be there for us in catastrophes. It’s that a can’t-do spirit, a shouldn’t-do spirit, guides the men who run the nation. Consider the congressional testimony of Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign manager, who assumed the top position at FEMA in 2001. He characterized the organization as “an oversized entitlement program,” and counseled states and cities to rely instead on “faith-based organizations . . . like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service.”

Is it any surprise, then, that the administration’s response to the devastation in New Orleans is of a piece with its response to the sacking of Baghdad once our troops arrived? “Stuff happens” was the way Don Rumsfeld described the destruction of Baghdad’s hospitals, universities and museums while American soldiers stood around. Now stuff has happened in New Orleans, too, even as FEMA was turning away offers of assistance. This is the stuff-happens administration. And it’s willing, apparently, to sacrifice any claim America may have to national greatness rather than inconvenience the rich by taxing them to build a more secure nation.

Stuff happens, it’s true. Stuff foreseen and unforeseen, avoidable and unavoidable. It has always been so. “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

It’s not the stuff that happens to us that makes us who we are, for good or ill. No, it’s what we do when stuff happens — how we respond, or fail to respond. All the choices we make along the way. And neglect is not excused by saying “stuff happens.”

Shortly before the start of her son’s invasion of Iraq, former first lady Barbara Bush said:

Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

Perhaps it was out of concern for the beautiful minds of civilians sitting comfortably back home that the Pentagon banned news photographs of coffins returning from Iraq. If so, it was very thoughtful of them.

It’s probably the same concern for all our beautiful minds that motivated FEMA’s attempt to block the news media from showing us any more dead bodies in New Orleans.

Washington Post writer Terry M. Neal doesn’t seem to appreciate FEMA’s great care to protect his beautiful mind:

Cadavers have a way of raising questions.

When people see them, they wonder, how did they get dead?

When a lot of people see a lot of dead bodies, politicians begin thinking of damage control.

Gosh, do you really suppose this policy is about protecting the Bush Administration? That bodies of Americans killed by government neglect aren’t testing well in Karl Rove’s focus groups?

Could it be that they don’