Obama's Katrina

Rahm Emanuel's famous phrase comes to mind. "Never let a crisis go to waste." This administration has certainly benefited hugely from crises. To my mind, they may even have had a hand in some. Now comes a crisis not of its own making; a thankless crisis; a bone-crushing crisis; an unavoidable crisis; a damning crisis - one in which the one who saves will forever be responsible for the saved. All the more reason to cut America down to size - to the likes of the Dominican Republic, for example, which, being right next door, has responded sensibly by putting additional guards along its border.

Though the media is already comparing this to Katrina - praising the president for his timely television appearances and, at the same time, never failing to invoke Bush's Katrina failure - it will not be able to ignore this failure much longer. Even without taking time out of the evening news cast to broadcast the names of soldiers fallen in service of their country (as was done for Bush), the NewsHour will be unable to ignore the steady stream of bad news and rumor emanating from Dante’s deepest rings of hell. After the media has been forced out, imagination will become the news. …and one can only imagine.

No doubt some enterprising blog will risk limb and reason to chronicle this soon to be epic failure, not necessarily to advance a better way forward, but to expose a man who uses his pulpit to make claims that no mortal can reasonably defend; to show up such a man as a charlatan and fraud, so that he will never be taken seriously again. (Good riddance, Mr. Gore. And tell your friend, Danny Glover, to keep talking.)