JAMES TARANTO: Katrina and ObamaCare: The analogy is less telling than who is employing it.

Granted, it’s an imperfect analogy. So is every other analogy, but there are some particularly glaring differences here. As Karl Van Zandt observes on Twitter, President Bush didn’t push Hurricane Katrina through Congress without a single vote from the other party. And, Global-warmist superstitions notwithstanding, Katrina was a natural disaster, not a man-caused one.

Yet even if you think the analogy is a bum rap for Bush, there is a satisfaction in watching it employed by none other than the New York Times, in a Friday “news analysis” by Michael D. Shear. . . .

Shear’s passive construction reads like an effort to let Obama off the hook, but it’s damning in its own way. Being “plagued” and “threatened”–being at the mercy of events–is not leadership but its opposite.

Shear goes on to observe that “unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn.”

That’s simply inaccurate: The Republican-led House has passed several legislative fixes, including one to delay the individual mandate, one to delay the employer mandate, and one to deprive congressional staffers and senior executive branch officials of federal subsidies.

On Friday–after Shear filed his article but in keeping with previously announced intentions–the House passed the Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013, which “allows providers to continue to offer in 2014 those health insurance plans in effect in the individual market as of January 1, 2013,” thereby partially ameliorating the effects of the ObamaCare swindle. The vote was 261-157, with 39 Democratic ayes.

Still, it’s remarkable that the New York Times, America’s most important liberal newspaper, is comparing Obama to the hated Bush.

Indeed.