PA-Sen: Santorum on the defensive on Katrina
by kos
Thu Sep 8th, 2005 at 11:14:06 PDT
Say what you will about Casey, but he and his campaign have kept Santorum on the defensive for several weeks. First on Iraq, and now on Katrina. Of course, Santorum helps by providing a steady stream of idiocy.
Sen. Rick Santorum said in a weekend interview that people who do not heed evacuation warnings in the future may need to be penalized. But the Pennsylvania Republican yesterday clarified his remarks, saying he did not mean people who lack cars or other resources.
His remarks were sharply criticized by the campaign of Democrat Bob Casey Jr., who is seeking to unseat Santorum, the No. 3 GOP leader in the Senate. "At face value [Santorum's comments] show an incredible amount of insensitivity to the Gulf Coast," said Jay Reiff, Casey's campaign manager. "What exactly does Senator Santorum mean by imposing penalties on people who often times had no transportation and no place to go?"
In a weekend interview with Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV about the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Santorum said: "I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving."
Santorum's furious backtracking suggests there's little political advantage to bashing the devastated people of the gulf coast. Republicans may want to rethink their "blame the victims" approach.
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Enough. It's Over.
by Hunter
Thu Sep 8th, 2005 at 10:35:22 PDT
"The bottom line is that despite the fact the president was strapped with two governors who bungled this crisis badly, in the end it is the president who sends in the National Guard and FEMA relief. The president's suggestion that the size of this storm caught all by surprise just doesn't get it. His administration was 48 hours late sending in the National Guard and poor Americans got raped and killed because of those mistakes."
-- Joe Scarborough, MSNBC
When Joe Scarborough and ultraconservative Family Research Council head Tony Perkins are on television discussing the government's failed response to the Katrina disaster... when Tucker Carlson is wading through storm waters with a dazed expression but an odd, new fire in his eyes... when Michelle Malkin takes time out from thoroughly out-frothing has-been Ann Coulter in order to call for FEMA head Michael Brown to be fired... I'm sorry, but the administration spin is spun. It's over. I'm not saying well-funded hacks won't be back with another angle tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, but when even partisans like that are calling you out, your spin isn't so much "tough" as just pathetic and an embarrassment to your country. For once in Bush's sheltered, spoonfed existence, he needs to put Karl Rove and the political machine of his government in a corner for a few days, and get around to doing some actual governing.
Everybody recognizes the delayed and ineffectual Katrina response as a massive failure of government. Everybody, sans a very few straggling and lonely pundits and bloggers for whom Bush will never, ever topple from his gilded pedestal. (And while those selected pundits are oft-used for their pure circus value, it's not like they had any broad credibility to start out with -- a hack is a hack.)
Do the state and local authorities share some blame? I'm sure they do, and we need to find out. But now-gutted FEMA and Homeland Security, which apparently have become nothing more than dumping grounds for Bush-Cheney campaign hacks needing paychecks, managed to bungle the national response so utterly that, for several critical days, it simply was non-existent. Yes, even in Republican-run Mississippi. Yes, even in the Louisiana parishes that were not flooded by the New Orleans levee breaks.
And yes, the President and his administration has now tried to bluster and blame-game their way through that horrific response, once they figured out the deaths were costing them polling points, proving once again that for this White House, image trumps actual government every day of the week. Tom DeLay has yanked his noose around the ostensible Republican "leadership" to warn against investigation, proving once again that there is literally no number of American deaths -- even when worst fears put the numbers in the tens of thousands -- which Tom DeLay finds important enough to act upon.
The administration said it was keeping us safe from terrorist attacks, or at least had a plan for responding to them; turns out, it can't even respond to disasters that have been broadly foreseen, and which come with days of prior warning. We need to find what's wrong, and fix it. Immediately.
That's only a "partisan" issue if you truly care about your party more than your country.
Which, as it turns out, some people do. And they're sticking out like sore thumbs right now.
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