“I reject outright the suggestion that President Bush was anything less than fully involved.”
— Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser
So the White House is now saying that President Bush was fully engaged in the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina by his government. This means that he was “fully involved” during the first 48 hours while thousands of Americans in New Orleans were dying and injured in the flooded streets or clinging to rooftops in the pouring ran with no help on the way.
Funny — what most of us remember was Mr. Bush cavorting with a guitar and Sen. McCain’s birthday cake.
Most tellingly, Townsend also said that the president’s critics were trying to “rewrite history” about the president’s actions. That was a dead giveaway that she — working from a script written by Karl Rove — was rewriting history even as she was speaking.
This is a remarkable revision of reality from the earlier revised reality that the White House floated in the weeks after the disaster. In the original concoction of events, Bush was a disengaged Bubble Boy who hates watching the news — even, apparently, the Fox News Channel where the news mullahs call the faithful to worship at his feet 24 hours a day.
In the original fictional narrative, it was the president’s phobia of the news, you see, that led to his confusion during the first 48 hours after Katrina. His aversion to information prevented him from watching live coverage of the destruction of America’s 44th largest metro area on television. This phobia was so bad that no one around the surly 59-year-old boy king — including his wife Laura or his parents, George I and Queen Bar — could muster the courage to convince him that something bad was happening in New Orleans, much less to tune in to the wall-to-wall coverage. It got so bad, finally, that one cowering but courageous courtier burned a DVD of news coverage and compelled Dear Leader to watch it.
The White House must have been surprised how readily the media and the public were willing to believe that Bush was such a dunce and a lout.
Now Bubble Boy is dead and the Mission Accomplished action figure preznint is back. So you know that something is up — a trick is in the works, records have been destroyed, memories have been cleansed, reality has been rewritten — if this strutting aristocratic popinjay is allowing anything close to blame to be laid at his own feet.
For one thing, it can only mean a fall guy has been chosen to take a bullet for Dear Leader. The question is, who will it be.
