Therapy for the Evil One

As a lefty, I hate having to add to my list of heroes, who really might really have helped Nola cope, both the military and the (pre-W) Halliburton/KBR. The day after a hurricane obviously isn't the time for environmental impact studies or self-esteem workshops, and we lefties need to forge a longterm consensus on this, sturdy enough to repel Rush&Rove-style attacks.

But where were the military and KBR when the levee broke? How did the neocons' greatest supposed strength prove their worst Achilles heel?

For some reason, the puppeteers whispering in W's earpiece didn't have a clue how to deal with a real logistic emergency, and didn't even have the sense to stand aside and let a grownup to take the wheel. Is it possible that none of them was glued to the live tv-news coverage-- has this administration deluded themselves into believing they're above the news, that reality is something they can arbitrarily create?

Their past experience had surely given them every reason to expect they could feed the newspeople a restricted diet of lies, and that the newspeople would bob their heads and gobble it down. And if there had been even a one-block physical distance between the reporters and the hurricane victims, this spinning probably would have worked. (In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the neocons recognise this, and look for ways to keep reporters penned up next time.)

W's incompetence has given birth to a White House culture where your title automatically means that others praise your performance, at least in public. The left needs to compile a reel of bureaucrats praising each other's responsiveness, as the live feed is showing hundreds dying.

My title for this post is inspired by Cheney, I think it was, saying that liberals after 9-11 wanted to give al Qaeda therapy... which has that perfect 1% level of truth allowing rightwing talkers to run away with it.

Therapy for Nola's ecology wasn't the prescription the day after the hurricane, but it was the prescription for the decade before. We need to learn to spinframe this.