An empty suit brings empty progress

From anchor Brian Williams' blog at msnbc.com:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

Why Brian, if I didn't know better, I'd say you were alluding to a rather particular conclusion. For instance, that for all the speechmaking and shirtsleeve gladhanding, Dear Leader's concerns focus more on repairing his image, rather than homes, and salvaging his disaster of a presidency, rather than an entire region. Not sure how that could happen after that inspiring Jackson Square address, complete with the obligatory invocation of the the memory of 9/11...

"Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development." -- NYT, 09/14/05

Of course. Put the rebuilding effort in the hands of an architect...of political campaigns. How could anyone draw any untoward conclusions from that?

I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky, given the track record. Rove's been publicly referred to as an "architect" countless times, so the preznit got it half-right. Which is more than can be said for appointing a political toadie horse association commissioner to be head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.