A reader responds

The following thoughts were sent to me by a new Joker reader. I thought they were worth posting :

Lately the blog mentioned David Brooks' sadly on-the-money prediction of the political and human disaster Katrina would turn out to be. I've not been a big Brooks fan for a while--he seems a little too fond of disingenuous techniques to defend administration actions by appeals to common sense, without mentioning them by name. But that one column made me think"maybe the guy's a little more independent after all." Then came Sunday, a very interesting news day. That morning, Brooks publishes a column predicting a "burst" of societal change after Katrina. Among the effects he predicts is a supercharge to any 2008 presidential bid by Rudy Giuliani. Odd that he wouldn't think that this might actually push people to vote Democrat, rather than just for a different kind of Republican, I think, but clever.

Then, on BBC Newsday on NPR that afternoon on the way to frisbee, a former chair of the RNC mentions that Katrina is a supercharge to any 2008 presidential bid by Rudy Giuliani. Wait a second. Google confirms that there is an explosion of stories on Saturday and Sunday linking Giuliani's name to the disaster, mostly because a single Republican senator has requested that he be made "Katrina czar". So I'm thinking that something very interesting happened here--to be conspiracy-paranoid, the conservative spin machine has apparently decided that the best way to save the Republicans in 2006 and 2008 is to throw Bush to the sharks and remind everyone of that other, effective, disaster-managing Republican, and the catastrophe that eventually made us proud, rather than ashamed.

To be honest, I hadn't noticed the Giuliani trend. But google "Giuliani katrina" and you get 126,000 hits. The first among them is "GOP wants Guiliani for Katrina Czar." It's interesting to note that in one case Rep John Sweeney R-N.Y. calls for Giuliani to replace the incompetent local officials (part of "shift the blame" game) and in another paragraph it quotes former House Leader Newt Gingrich calling for him to be the White House point man since the administration couldn't get it right.