The Politicization of Katrina by Karl Rove

The more and more I find out about the inner workings of the Bush administration, the more I want to see some jail terms handed out. Hat Tip to our friends at the Daily Kingfish for their post on this Monday.

There is a new book out titled "Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove". Salon has a nice article containing an excerpt from the book. You can read the Salon piece here: "How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned"

The first evidence of Rove's involvement in the Katrina disaster occurred on Tuesday afternoon. "Rove understood what a nightmare this was for the president," Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana says, "so he went into high gear on the spin thing they're so good at in the White House. Rove had David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana. I was at a press conference and David Vitter walked up to the mike and said, 'I just got off the phone with Karl Rove.' I looked at the governor and she looked at me, like, 'Why is David Vitter on the phone with Karl Rove?' I mean, he could have been talking to generals, the president himself, but Rove is just a political hatchet man."

Remember this is Karl Rove who had an office IN THE WHITE HOUSE, a first (and please never again) for a political advisor. That fact alone provides a glimpse of how the Bush administration used Rove's abilities to politicize everything under the sun. Anything that happened became an opportunity to make Democrats look bad and republicans good. We have NEVER seen this level of politicization.

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. "They looked around," Landrieu says, "and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans -- someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater."

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him "Ray Reagan." In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush's campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin's ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco's last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

While thousands of people were stranded in a flooded major U.S. city, all the White House could think about was how to use the catastrophe to their political gain, via Rovian tactics. This is the not the first time this has come up regarding Katrina. Back in January 2007, Michael Brown the former head of FEMA accused the White House of playing partisan politics.

"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,''' he said, without naming names. "'We can't do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'''

Brown declined to say who in the White House had argued for federalizing the response only in Louisiana. He said that he'd later learned of the machinations through Blanco's office and from federal officials.

Blanco reacted sharply to Brown's remarks.

"This is exactly what we were living but could not bring ourselves to believe. Karl Rove was playing politics while our people were dying,'' Blanco said through a spokeswoman, referring to Bush's top political strategist. "The federal effort was delayed, and now the public knows why. It's disgusting.''

I truly believe we will see the day when Bush, Rove, and Cheney will have their day in court. We are seeing the groundwork being laid now with the McClellan book, the Iraq reports, etc...