WisPolitics Budget Blog

History is sometimes the moment a bell rings. He had a historic opportunity to seize this and become a great leader and he bobbled it not just once but four or five times. This is a speech that needed to have been delivered within days of the hurricane.
Douglas Brinkley
Historian and professor at the University of New Orleans

I would take it a step further, and suggest had the President kicked his Homeland Security Secretary in the bricks and mortar, and deployed a rapid response effort over and above the bumbling efforts of the New Orleans Mayor and the Louisiana Governor…

(As mentioned here first)

…had Bush unleashed the power of our military and swept through the Gulf Coast within 48 hours of Katrina making landfall, the speech he delivered would have been a speech of triumph, rather than a speech of contrition.

And the price tag of this massive spending program of $200 billion would have been exponentially smaller.

The best newspaper in the country had the best assessment of why President Bush morphed from the heir to the Reagan legacy to the illegitimate son of LBJ and FDR.

Ironically, everything President Bush called for in last night’s speech became a necessity because, because, anyone? Anyone? Government failed its people.

At all levels, government failed.

President Bush’s speech was a political do-over; made necessary because the only political path left to political recovery is a massive infusion of government money to cover the tracks of what was not done hours before and after Katrina struck.

The President has bet the public trough on a legacy; a legacy though, that can hardly be called conservative.

At least the flame burning off to the side, guiding the way for future conservatives, is The Weekly Standard.