As Seen on Television - 6/6/08

Salon.com has published a shocking excerpt from Paul Alexander's recently released Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove, How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned (h/t bigeasy). The selection reveals the intricately devised system of leaked lies that were carefully woven into blame for the purpose of ass covering, completely avoiding responsibility, and how this strategy was coldly executed with complete disregard for any human suffering that might be the result thereof. It exposes yet another example of the deeply embedded, narcissistic dysfunction that infects not only the current administration but also much of our culture, in which appearances are valued above realities and artistic spin trumps creative problem-solving without any consideration for the loss. Alexander writes:

As it turned out, the federal government's attempts to respond to the storm and flooding appeared frozen by inadequacy and ineptitude. Thousands of people were stranded in their homes, unable to make a better escape than to their rooftops to wave for help and hope emergency personnel in helicopters might rescue them. Tens of thousands of refugees were holed up downtown in the Convention Center and the Superdome, yet FEMA was unable to bring in even food, water, or ice, not to mention buses to evacuate them. Touring the Superdome on Tuesday night, [Louisiana Governor, Kathleen] Blanco was disturbed by what she witnessed: in short, no federal assistance whatsoever. All she saw was the Louisiana National Guard and the Louisiana State Police -- certainly not enough of a law enforcement presence to be able to maintain order without additional guardsmen and troops.

...Despite his expertise being politics, the administration had made Rove a central player in the handling of the disaster. "A light switch in the White House didn't get turned on without going through Rove," says Adam Sharp, an aide to [Louisiana Senator, Mary] Landrieu. "It was clear that Rove was the point person for the White House on this disaster."

...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." 

This is the same pattern of dysfunction that gave New Orleanians their failed levees in the first place, institutionalized in the U.S. Army, specifically its Corps of Engineers: buck-passing, ass covering, avoidance of responsibility, propensity for placing blame as shame's cover-up, and spinning reality to fit what the boss wants to hear without any regard for truth. These were the core behaviors that led to the inadequately designed and poorly constructed levees in New Orleans, "flood protection" doomed to collapse. It's a cultural flaw, a systemic pattern, and therefore national, coming soon to a government project near you.

In fact, it's precisely how we were duped into a vanity war in Iraq, our treasury drained, our military hobbled, our precious defenders maimed and lost, their families deprived of what was theirs, an entire nation that didn't belong to us virtually destroyed, our place in the world horridly besmirched, and, ultimately, our safety compromised by a fey president's delusions, dysfunction writ large on a global scale, to predictably tragic results.

It was obvious to all thoughtful people who watched, as the events in New Orleans continued to unfold into days four and five and six and August turned into September in 2005, that when a federal government as powerful as ours did not provide any kind of rescue or relief to the unprecedented suffering, it could have only been because they chose not to do so. Looking at it objectively, reading Alexander's step by step account of how that evolved, it's clear that we've been scammed, conned with a top-down structure that's dirty, diseased and desperately in need of disinfecting. We've gotten what we asked for: faux leadership weaving their script, elegantly executed, as seen on television. Go. Now. Read. Vote.