Well, it was a long time coming, but I'm pleased to see that Karl Rove is finally acknowledging what most of us have known all along. He's spent years defending the Bush Administration's response to Katrina, and as recently as March of last year, he told ABC News:
"With all due respect, the federal government's responsibilities were met under Katrina which were to provide the immediate assistance, to pluck people off of the roofs," Rove said.
And in his new memoir, he "staunchly defends" Bush's handling of the disaster, blaming it all on local officials.
But at last, today in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, Rove comes clean:
Today in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove pens an op-ed titled: "Yes, the Gulf Spill is Obama’s Katrina." He predictably places blame on Obama for a "lethargic," "slow," and "unacceptable" response to the BP oil spill.
Better late than never, Karl. Because, as is immediately clear, when one uses the phrase "Obama's Katrina" and associates the words "lethargic", "slow" and "unacceptable" with it, one is using it in a negative sense--the obvious implication being that Katrina was a colossal cock-up. Right? You thought all that through before you wrote the column, right Karl?
As Think Progress correctly notes:
But the real significance of the op-ed is not what Rove has to say about Obama; rather, it’s that Rove is implicitly acknowledging that Bush screwed up the response to Katrina. Rove is essentially trying to make the case that Obama mismanaged a disaster almost as terribly as he and Bush did.
And by extension, of course, every rightwing shrieker who's made the same charge in the past few weeks is doing exactly the same thing.
Not that they care. The aim here, as always, is to cynically manipulate the event for political gain. I doubt you'll find Limbaugh or Rove or Fox "News" sweating the fact that they're essentially walking back everything they've been denying about Katrina for the past five years.
Among other things, you'll note that a slow federal response is no longer the fault of local officials, especially since the Governor of Louisiana is now a Republican, and he's currently begging for federal help. Gone are the days of self-sufficiency for state and local pols! Why, it wasn't that long ago that a governor needed to fill out every request for federal aid in triplicate and a week in advance of the actual disaster. It would appear that Governor Jindal faces no such hurdles, lucky him.
Rove's op-ed means that you're going to be seeing a lot of this over the coming days and weeks. This is the new meme, and the fax machines are churning as we speak. So if one of your wingnut colleagues or relatives should happen to use the "Obama's Katrina" line on you, you may want to ask them exactly what they mean by it.