I'm stunned. Seriously, I am. I've never heard Bush take responsibility for anything before--what was supposed to motivate him to start now? I mean, now that "Brownie" resigned I had assumed the GOP would go back on the assault, same as always. But no! He threw a change up at us this time. And boy has it thrown the blogosphere for a loop.
Hostile bloggers like Steve Soto, Josh Marshall, Lean Left, and The Talent Show are all disoriented. They think that it was the right thing to do, but are convinced that it was a completely political calculation designed to dodge true accountability. As TTS puts it:
It will be interesting to see if this kind of "aknowledgement" [sic] of responsibility becomes the basis by which, as always, Bush and Co. manage to skate by without actually being held responsible by anyone. My feeling is, sadly, that we will once again see any serious attempt to reform the system stymied, and the only people to suffer any political punishment will be the people who were most vocally calling for accountability in the first place.
But if anything, it's worse for the right. At least liberals believe that Bush actually did screw up Katrina. Conservatives (or should I say, the more intellectually dishonest of them) are now caught between their pathological desire to attack liberals and their sycophancy to President Bush (or their oh-so-brave "challenges" for him to be yet more conservative). LaShawn Barber, for example, avoids the issue of Katrina entirely--only asking that Democrats apologize for welfare and demanding that Bush apologize for "fail[ing] to harness the power of a conservative government, squandering precious time and resources." Yes, that's really the problem here. A rather neat turnabout, to tell the truth: it attacks Bush for his liberalism and liberals for their liberalism, making this apology just another case of liberals being wrong. Woohoo.
Unsurprisingly, my co-blogger Joe has a characteristically thoughtful and erudite post on the matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment