Katrina recriminations

Yesterday on Backstory, Eric Von asked the panel (which turned out to be Jim Rowen, former MJS editor and Norquist chief of staff, and me) whether the new video on Katrina would hurt the Republicans. Jim seemed to think it would; I said Katrina was yesterday's story.

I still think that, but I had not yet seen the supposed "smoking gun" video and did not anticipate the way that the story of "Bush caught in a lie" would fall apart. First, the AP story has been widely misreported. Bush was warned that the levees could be "overtopped." That's bad, but its not the same - and doesn't have the same consequences - as a breach. More fundamentally, we now see that Gov. Bianco erroneously told Bush that the levees had not been breached.

On the inital video, the much maligned Mike Brown looks pretty engaged. He is skeptical about the Mayor's plan to house folks in the Superdome for precisely the reasons that made the Dome a bad place to be. In retrospect, its hard to see why the Mayor didn't order an earlier evacuation of the city and why he didn't commandeer every vehicle in the city to get folks out.