I am really confused at this moment as to why not only bush is at fault, but also the republican party. I tried to debate that point with a friend and I feel that I was not able to prove it with what info I have dug up or read here on DailyKos or other sites. If anyone can help me organize myself, it would be much appreciated!
The way I went about arguing that it was bush's fault was through indirect and direct avenues. The indirect were that he is responsible for the people he put into place, aka brown who totaly screwed things up (Which if there is a diary some where that lists all of his faults, it would be much appreciated if you could email the link to me, I can not find it). The more direct is that while bush was on vacation, he could have spent that time in DC and maybe used some executive powers such as an executive order.
My opponent countered that it was not his fault but more so the beurocracy of the government. The executive orders would be useless and the reason for the government's slow reaction was because of well, beurocracy. He never really explained, ran out of time on that point. As to the leader being responsible for his delegates, he refuted that by saying "that is bull". It is the person who's fault it was an no one else's.
The next point about the republican party to be blamed was a bit easier to prove. My main argument was that it was their actions that blended the FEMA into DoHS because of the bills they passed, along with the cuts in funding for FEMA. The best way that I proved this was with the quote "Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub." The argument I used was, becasue of their shrinking of the federal government, it is now not able to handle these kind of disasters that are expected to happen.
He had no real rebuttle to this. Just sort of wandered off topic as to why Democrats/Liberals are so "elitist".
In hind sight, I see myself as a failure of a debater. My purpose in writing this diary is to hope that maybe the DailyKos community could start to organize a debate strategy for this topic. Put the information together and have it ready for use, which I belive will be soon. I would start on doing this, but I have a certain lack of experience in this area and am new to DailyKos and do not know how to ask a question such as that. Any help you can give me would be much appreciated. More so, I think that by organizing this information together into a debate setup would be invaluable!