Another Poll

According to Newsmax, the latest Mainstream Media exercise in measuring their own effectiveness shows they are failing abysmally.  Efforts to focus blame for Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath completely and solely on George W. Bush are falling flat.

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005 12:52 p.m. EDT

New Poll: Americans Not Blaming Bush for Katrina Problems

Only 13 percent of those polled believe President Bush is "most responsible” for the problems in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a new poll discloses.

And 35 percent said Bush has done a "great” or "good” job responding to the hurricane and flooding, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

Meanwhile, editorial writers over at the New York Times are pulling out all the stops.  A little flavor of it from the lead editorial:

No administration could credibly investigate such an immense failure on its own watch. And we have learned through bitter experience - the Abu Ghraib nightmare is just one example - that when this administration begins an internal investigation, it means a whitewash in which no one important is held accountable and no real change occurs.

Not to be outdone Maureen Dowd heaps on this inane bit of hyperbole:

It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the destruction of New Orleans.

Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt.

Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the shattered parish as "Baghdad under water," the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights.

Thomas Friedman is oblivious to the humor.  He is calling somebody else incompetent.

If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

And finally here's Nicolas Kristoff, Ambassador Joe Wilson's buddy.

The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.

It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.

Well I have to say, I'm delighted to see that the Times recognizes larger the problem brought to light by the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.  Americans are not blaming the right people, and the Times is here to fix that problem.  They have their work cut out for them.

Other findings of the poll conducted Tuesday:

18 percent said federal agencies are "most responsible” for the problems, 25 percent said state and local officials are to blame, and 38 percent think no one is to blame; 6 percent have no opinion.

29 percent said that "top officials in the federal agencies responsible for handling emergencies should be fired”; 63 percent think they shouldn’t lose their jobs.

CNN, USA Today, and Gallup could help quite a bit by including more Times readers in their poll.  I mean, after all, what are polls for anyway?