Here's Looking Down On You--One Year Later

"What--no groveling?"

Digby reminds us of another anniversary:

I have to give the administration credit for their smooth pivot from their Katrina failure to defeating Hitler. It was savvy, you have to admit, to go down to New Orleans and give a couple of plodding, desultory speeches while Rummy delivered a half-mad stemwinder about appeasement in the 1930's. Then, the minute the Katrina "anniversary" was over, Bush hightailed it out of town and immediately evoked the spectre of the Nazis, commies and martians coming to kill us all in our beds. I'm not seeing much about New Orleans anymore.

But I think it's important to remember, nonetheless, that while Bush drones on and on about terror and fear and struggle and pain and sacrifice this morning, one year ago today Katrina was far from over. Indeed, the story of his incompetence was just beginning...

After he returned to Washington he held that bizarre, stiff press conference as we watched people begging to be rescued from the top of their houses.

The New York Times described it the next day:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

He can assume a strong, manly pose today and catterwaul about "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century," and fearmonger about "a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology" from the comfort of a hand picked audience. But when the chips were down a year ago, he proved he couldn't lead his way out of a FEMA trailer.