More compare and contrast:
- 2005: Media destroys President Bush over his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Or as Evan Thomas of Newsweek put it in mid-September of 2005, less than three weeks after the storm touched ground in New Orleans, “Katrina: How Bush Blew It.”
And of course, Howard Kurtz, the media “watchdog” for the Washington Post, Newsweek’s parent company, has his priorities in order on this one: “Obama to write Newsweek cover story on Haiti; conservative criticism to follow?”
(Mock Newsweek cover from Rob Long’s parody of the “news” magazine in National Review.)
Update: To build on one of the comments below, apparently, Obama is willing to take a good chunk out of what is likely already an intensely hectic schedule — which presumably could be better used to coordinate relief efforts — to pen however many hundreds of words of Newsweek asked for. Or, as is far more likely the case, a ghostwriter wrote this up and Obama signed off on it, and the magazine and the newspaper that publishes the essay are willing to silently play along with this minor fiction. Either way, as the links above highlight, this makes for quite a contrast with how those publications treated the last president when a natural disaster occurred.
Update: Welcome Politico readers! Not sure how much we’ll agree on the issues, but feel free to check out the rest of the blog by starting here.
“Let me be clear. As I walked across the ever rising waters towards that devastated land, I pondered whether luck or Divine Providence recognized my lone ability to restore hope. As I towed the USNS Comfort with my teeth, my eminent mind had time to reflect on what The Fates wished me to do after I delivered Hope to the poor Haitians.”
Ridiculous. What the hell does Bill Ayers know about Haiti?
I don’t have time to write magazine articles about Haiti. Do you?
I have never seen a serving President with so much free time. Does this guy actually spend any time behind that desk in the Oval Office?
#3 bgates – You just slay me!
#4 jvon – Oval office, hmm? Where do you think he writes those articles? It’s not like he actually governs. That’s what Congress is for, anyways. And it’s not like he’d know HOW to govern!
Perhaps news sources that are always wrong are as useful as it they were always right. You just have to negate the result to get the answer. It is interesting (if deadly) to witness the proliferation of statism by way of so many willing participants.
Be careful what you wish for.
Aware or not, Pres. Obama is going to own Haiti for the rest of his presidency. Not something to be wished for—IMHO. It’s a shame that his “rising to meet the challenge” in such a precipitous manner did not allow for asking the U.N. to take the lead, or at least forming a “coalition of the willing,” including at least the G-8.
Ownership legally will be solely that of the U.S. Government—meaning us, and just about forever. Ugh.
#2 Ashen
You forgot where he admonished the North American and Caribbean plates to get along, threatening them with a sternly worded letter, and then healed the Earth of the Enriquillo fault.
A day and a half after the 2004 Tsunami struck, Bush had the US Navy on site, with fresh water and hospital ships and supplies. I remember newscasters screaming during day three of Katrina, and blaming Bush for not making it all better, but we’re three days plus into the Haiti disaster, and little has happened. NOT because “Obama Sucks” (as the press immediately said of Bush) but because it is difficult to mobilize in a disaster, and Bush had Ray Nagin (who resisted Bush’s advice that he evacuate NOLA) and Kathleen “No, I don’t think I’ll use my national guard, and stop butting in, Mr. Not-Really-President” Blanco to deal with. Sure, the Katrina effort was flawed, but the press savaged Bush, while Bush had the Coast Guard in place (over 3,000 rescues in those first three days) and had done everything he CONSTITUTIONALLY Could do as president.
Bush was plenty flawed, but the press and the dems used Katrina to demolish him, by underreporting what he was doing, by reporting outright LIES about what was happening in NOLA (Remember the “they’re raping babies in the Superdome” lie? “Ten thousand dead bodies!” lie? The press lied. The Dems loved the narrative.
88,000 people moved by helicopter during the Katrina rescue efforts. It took an all-hands, no holds barred effort by the media to keep that off the air. Rember the people “stranded” in the SuperDome? We were told they were murdering and raping each other. The truth is the National Guard had set up an HQ there. The truth came out months later and was markedly different from the narrative foisted upon us by the media. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/katrina_what_the_media_missed.html
Didn’t Caiphas and Barrabas co-author an article for Newsweek after the Good Friday earthquake tore the fabric in the temple into two, headlined, “Nazarene smashes buildings”?
So he’s cutting out the middleman like a good fascist, in the style of Mussolini and Hitler.
Newsweek wasn’t fawning enough, so they decided to just let him write it for them.
Isn’t it funny how fast people forgot how Obama left all those people in Kentucky to freeze to death.
FEMA has some internal metrics that they use to keep track of their responsiveness. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but assume they entail things like numbers of pallets of food delivered per capita, or patients treated per day, or gallons of fresh water delivered per city block. Probably all of the above and a whole lot more besides. Anyway, the details are unimportant.
Some time after Katrina, a report was released showing that they had delivered better on these metrics than in any prior hurricane disaster ever. They were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the storm, and by the fact that much of N.O. is below sea level and hence remained flooded after the storm, instead of the storm surge subsiding and allowing access to personnel and vehicles. They were also impaired by incompetence on the part of local authorities, as someone else discussed above.
The blame that Bush and FEMA got for the response was totally misplaced. They did at least an adequate job, and if you trust FEMA to report on itself accurately, a better job than ever before. But it made for such good TV, with images of an overwhelming disaster affecting so many members of a favored minority, and of course the enemedia was still smarting from Bush’s recent re-election. They are like termites always eating away at everything good about America, but in this instance they became a swarm of hornets.
Which is why the MSM are going down with him. (Does ANYONE still read NEWSWEEK? Outside of Dentists’ offices, I mean?)