Blame The Victim Talking Points
I heard this shocking exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie MacIntyre lst night too, and was stunned. There is clearly a culture of pass-the-buck whining about military failure taking over the Pentagon if their first reaction is to complain about partisanship...
But I think there is more to it. Everyone has noted that Michael Brown (the estate planning lawyer/Bush crony who is in charge of the biggest logistical challenge in FEMA's history) was making the rounds implying that the victims asked for what they got when they didn't obey the mandatory evacuation. But he wasn't the only one who said this explicitly. I wrote yesterday that Michael Chertoff, his boss, said the same thing:
"The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster," he said on NBC's Today program. "Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part."
This was an official talking point. On Thursday, September 1st, three days after the scope of the disaster was well known, George W. Bush sent his disaster officials out to the media with the instructions that they were to blame the victims --- the same day that we were seeing dead bodies and dehydrated children all over our television sets.
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