BUSH AND KATRINA….As Laura Rozen points out, even George Bush’s defenders over at National Review think his reaction to Hurricane Katrina has been oddly detached from reality. I have to agree. While New Orleans was undergoing a slow motion catastrophe on Monday and Tuesday, Bush was mugging for the cameras, cutting a cake for John McCain, playing the guitar for Mark Wills, delivering an address about V-J day, and continuing with his vacation. Then, on Wednesday, when he finally got around to saying something, it turned out to be a flat, defensive, laundry list of a speech.
These are not the actions of a president in touch with the country ? especially a president who usually excels at reacting to tragedies like this. When you put this together with his increasingly robotic speeches about progress in Iraq, his tone deaf reaction to Cindy Sheehan’s vigil, and the continuing meltdown in public support for the war, I think that for the first time in his presidency Bush has found himself in a corner he doesn’t know how to get out of. And it’s showing.
