How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned

From Salon courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. "They looked around," Landrieu says, "and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans -- someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater."

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him "Ray Reagan." In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush's campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin's ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco's last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

Rove and Nagin were communicating through e-mail. "I heard Nagin was bragging about being in touch with The Man," Blanco says. "Nagin took the position that they were the people who could help the most to do what he wanted. People get highly complimented when they have contact with the White House." In this case the trade-off for Nagin was his willingness to cooperate with Rove. "I knew Ray Nagin could be easily manipulated," Landrieu says. "I could feel it. We were all working together in a relatively small building. We were in close proximity. But I could see where Rove was going. Blame Blanco. Blame the levee board. Blame the corruption in New Orleans. 'The reason the city is going underwater is because the city is corrupt,' Rove was saying. 'But don't blame the Republicans or George W. Bush or David Vitter. We are the white guys in shining armor, and we are going to come in and save the city from years of corruption.' That was their story and they sold it very well."

Rove sold the story, as he had in the past, through the media. On Wednesday, while Blanco was trying to get help from the White House, her staff began receiving calls from reporters questioning her handling of the disaster, almost all of them citing as their sources unnamed senior White House officials.

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This brings up some bad memories.

I mean, at the time it was completely obvious what the White House was doing, playing their usual game of blame and divert. Also at the time, however, it wasn't possible to be completely sure of who it was that was screwing up. I was just scanning through some of my posts from September of '05, and I was saying, here and there, that there was plenty of blame to go around, but that the lion's share had to go to the feds, which was so achingly obvious, seeing as how they didn't even show up until a week after Katrina hit, and their Department of Homeland Security website was literally declaring that huge emergencies are their responsibility. But maybe Louisiana state government was screwing up too. Maybe Nagin was somehow fucking it all up. Maybe New Orleans corruption was finally doing the city in.

Now we know: the "failures" of state and local government, the role that corruption supposedly played, were a near total fabrication, invented by Karl Rove, and then blasted 24/7 by the always compliant corporate media. Well, maybe Rove's good buddy Ray Nagin can take some of the blame, but his failure is nothing when compared to Bush's failure--if anything, Nagin's worst deed was allowing himself to be made a propaganda puppet by Rove. Ironically, in the end, it was the Louisiana National Guard, not FEMA or Federal troops, that rescued everybody--by the time Bush's people showed up, there was virtually nobody left who needed to be rescued. But the constructed "controversy" continues, to some extent, to this very day.

Fortunately, the American public very quickly saw through Rove's traditional tactics, making Bush's approval ratings drop significantly for the first time since 9/11, but I continue to be amazed by how easy it appears to be for the White House to get the corporate news media to endlessly repeat its bullshit as fact. Even today, when everybody knows how full of shit W is.

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