Brendan Nyhan

Finally, after reports from The New Republic and Time about his weak/inflated resume, Michael Brown is out. Apparently Bush finally realized that “Brownie” isn’t doing “a heck of a job” after all.

That said, though, this is clearly a case of too little, too late. Post-Katrina poll numbers (including the AP poll released today) have Bush in the 39-42 percent approval range, which is getting down to the hardcore Republican base.

Update 9/10: As commenters point out, Brown hasn’t been actually fired from FEMA — he’s just been reassigned to Washington. Unbelievable — the Responsibility Era continues…

Like Eric Alterman, Matthew Yglesias is sarcastically conflating intention with (alleged) effect in the war in Iraq (and invoking Nuremberg and totalitarianism):

“FREEDOM” WALK. The Pentagon’s planned “freedom walk” to commemorate September 11 on Sunday seems to involve precious little freedom, as Atrios notes. It also seems to have precious little to do with commemorating 9-11. Indeed, while I hesitate to throw this kind of rhetoric around, it seems fair to say that the Defense Department has decided to use your tax dollars to finance a Nuremberg-style rally aimed at bolstering political support for the incumbent party and smearing the opposition as un-patriotic. Not that I think Bush is about to start firing up the gas chambers, but Milan Kundera’s thoughts on totalitarian kitsch seem apropos.

…The good news is that on September 24, there’ll be another concert on the mall organized by anti-war musicians featuring some of my favorite bands. Until then, remember — loving America means wanting to see thousands of soldiers killed in an effort to ignore al-Qaeda and bring an Iranian-backed theocracy to power in Iraq.

Here’s Alterman — note the similarity in how the jargon works:

In the name of fighting “terrorism,” the administration has sent 40 percent of the National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to create more terrorists and let bin Laden get away.

As people who (rightly) decry rhetoric suggesting war opponents are intentionally hurting the country/aiding the enemy, it’s more than a bit hypocritical for Yglesias and Alterman to run around suggesting that the administration is intentionally harming the nation’s interests.

Update 9/9: In comments, Yglesias writes:

I think this is unfair. The suggestion “that the administration is intentionally harming the nation’s interests” clearly came in the context of a satirization of the White House p.o.v. not a literal effort to characterize it. It’s fair to say that satire — Onion headlines, etc. — are not contributions to rational debate in the same way that straight political analysis is, but unless you want to deem satire out of bounds per se it’s clearly wrong to apply the standards of straight debate to satire. The anti-satire view, meanwhile, would be pretty radically at odds with the western tradition which has always maintained a role for political satire as an element of the broader discourse. The Alterman case, I would maintain, is different.

On Nuremberg and totalitarianism, meanwhile, I’m not just invoking these at random. I explicitly disavow a global Bush-Nazi comparison and instead cite Milan Kundera’s specific point about kitsch, complete with the best link I could find on the web. I have in mind what he says about “The Grand March” in chapter 6 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and I think it’s apropos.

I don’t think I’m being unfair. What Yglesias wrote is not particularly funny, and it uses a jargon tactic I’ve frequently identified in the past. To approach this from another perspective, why is it that statement any more “satire” than what, say, Ann Coulter does when she falsely suggests that liberals want to do various awful things? Isn’t this a distinction without a difference — ie my aggressive jargon is “satire” and hers is vicious and awful? Conservatives certainly find what she does amusing.

As for Kundera, I’m not familiar with his writing, but “Nuremberg-style rallies” is a little much regardless of Yglesias’s disavowal of gas chambers.

Update 9/9 — Yglesias has posted a second comment:

Well, if you’re not familiar with Kundera I guess we’ll just leave it at that. I wonder, though, if you’re trying to say that it’s always illegitimate to make a comparison involving Nazis? It’s irresponsible, of course, to suggest that the Bush administration (or any other actor in contemporary American politics) is just like Hitler but I think it’s often fair to raise more limited comparisons in order to make a point. Jon Chait did a column defending my view of this subject.

On satire, I don’t really know what to say. “[W]hy is it that statement any more ‘satire’ than what, say, Ann Coulter does when she falsely suggests that liberals want to do various awful things?” There’s a clear difference between a false statement intended to deceive and a false statement intended as satire. Whether or not the satire is successful — i.e., “funny” — isn’t the relevant metric. This from Ms. Coulter, for example, doesn’t seem funny to me, but it’s clearly satire. By contrast, when she wrote “Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy” she was writing falsely in a non-satirical vein.

It seems to me that in my post, satiric intent was made clear by the fact that the assertion “loving America means …” was put in my voice when the audience clearly recognizes that what follows are not my true beliefs. I didn’t say, “George W. Bush thinks…” and then follow with some things he didn’t think.

I’ll grant that what Yglesias wrote is more clearly demarcated to the reader as non-literal truth than, say, what Alterman wrote. Regardless of whether it was intended as satire, though, I don’t think that suggesting people are intentionally harming the country is a particularly worthwhile use of satire (which I happen to like very much). And in the reverse situation, I doubt Yglesias would view satire the same way. For example, let’s suppose that Bill Clinton had demagogued what happened in Somalia and said that people who didn’t support the military effort there weren’t patriotic. If Rush Limbaugh had said, “satirically,” that to liberals “loving America means wanting to see scores of US soldiers killed in an effort to divert attention from real threats to our country,” it would not have gone over well on the left. And in fact, Limbaugh uses this perverse form of “satire” all the time.

As for Nazi analogies, I’m not willing to say “never,” but I will say this: I find it hard to come up with circumstances where they are appropriate. Here’s why. Let’s assume there is a continuum of economic and political freedom, with the most free democracies on one hand and the most evil regimes at the other. There are countless historical comparisons that can be made and analogies that can be drawn between different regimes along this scale. But people tend to jump right from the US (at one end) to the Nazis (at the other). Why? Well, obviously the Nazis are famous, and thus they are more accessible from memory (this is called the “availability heuristic” in psychology). But Nazis are rarely the most appropriate comparison. Is the Freedom Walk really comparable to Nuremberg? Does government regulation make the EPA comparable to Nazis? (Etc.) Almost always, the analogy isn’t being used because it’s accurate, but because it makes the other side look bad. I’ll grant that the Nuremberg rallies are one of the most famous mass political events in history, but I still don’t know that the analogy adds to Yglesias’s point enough to justify its use.

The other problem with invoking the Nazis is that the negative associations associated with controversial persons, historical figures, etc. are activated outside of consciousness. In the political science and psychology literatures, this has been shown to happen immediately and automatically. Thus, someone raising the Nazis can trade on the negative associations attached to the Nazis even as they disavow the exploitation of those associations. The same applies with race, as in the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which activated racial considerations without specifically mentioning race (as Tali Mendelberg showed in an excellent Public Opinion Quarterly article).

Does this mean people can’t talk about the Nazis in public discourse at all? Of course not. Serious historical and political discussion is fine. However, casual Nazi analogies almost always drag debate down rather than elevating it.

Update 9/12: Altercation readers — my original post on Alterman is here and my response to him is here.

Here’s Tom DeLay’s classy response to Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to appoint Democrats to a Republican-dominated Katrina commission:

When aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) attacked Pelosi’s response to the investigative commission, they illustrated it with an e-mailed photo of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury intersection, associated with the hippies of the 1960s.

Because nothing says ’60s liberal like opposing a partisan inquiry into one of the worst disasters in American history!

From MoJo Blog via Atrios, yet another example of the administration’s MO of taking a crisis and claiming that it necessitates some pre-existing policy agenda (tax cuts, ANWR, Iraq, etc.):

It’s an old business myth that the Chinese character for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” It doesn’t. But I’m not sure anyone’s told the Bush administration, judging from this little tidbit in CongressDaily today: “[White House spokesman Trent] Duffy asserted that the vast spending that would be required to address the hurricane’s impact adds to the need to change Social Security, which threatens to strain the budget in coming years.” Ah yes, despite the fact that privatization that would add trillions to the deficit in the short term, at a time when Katrina will already add $100 billion or more to the deficit this year, the time for privatization is now, obviously, in the wake of disaster. Um, no.

Katrina has buried the latest news on the payola front — more third parties have been caught promoting Bush administration policies without disclosing that they’re receiving taxpayer dollars for doing so:

In 2003 and 2004, Garcini’s nonprofit group, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education Options (CREO), received two unsolicited grants, totaling $900,000, from the U.S. Education Department, to promote school choice and tutoring options for Hispanic children. But in two op-eds in the Morning News and a third that appeared in two Spanish-language publications earlier in 2004, Garcini never disclosed, as was required by law, that CREO had received the government grants.

Federal investigators probing the department’s public relations contracts this week say the department has given nearly $4.7 million to groups including Garcini’s to promote administration education priorities since 2002, but that in 10 of 11 cases examined, the groups didn’t disclose — in print, on radio or in other media, such as brochures or handbooks — that taxpayer funds were used.

John Higgins, the department’s Inspector General, found no “covert propaganda” at work, but told administration officials that they should consider asking for some of their money back.

I’m not a big fan of John Kerry, but this prediction (from an email to supporters) is dead-on:

How long will it be before [Republicans] start telling us that tax cuts for the wealthy can provide just the stimulus we need to get the Gulf Coast economy moving again?

I’d say a week, maybe less.

Even top Republicans agree — Michael Brown must go:

Senior House Republican officials said that, behind the scenes, some lawmakers were pressing the Bush administration to dismiss Michael D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“He’s been compromised,” said one top Republican lawmaker who works closely with the White House and did not want to be identified when discussing a delicate administration personnel issue.

Update 9/8: Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s Bob Novak with more on GOP support for firing Brown:

The Democrats on the ground, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, have done little to commend themselves. But that does not excuse the federal performance, in the candid opinion of many Republicans. To start with, these Republicans talk about taking FEMA back from the Homeland Security Department. They agree that heads must roll, certainly Brown’s and possibly Chertoff’s. Above all, these Republican politicians say, let’s get the lawyers out of disaster relief.

Here’s yet another illustration of the ugly binary logic of the Bush administration, which deals almost exclusively in false dichotomies — with us or against us, stay the course or cut and run, etc.

As I described below, approximately 1,000 firefighters from around the country are being used as community relations specialists and PR props rather than helping in the relief effort.

I neglected to point out, however, that some of them have began refusing to wear FEMA t-shirts as a form of protest. In response, as Atrios and Salon point out, the FEMA spokesperson said this:

“I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

Black put it best:

So, if you object to having yourself be flown across the country so you can be a human prop for the president instead of actually using your skills to help the citizens of this country then you need to revisit your commitment to “the citizens of this country.”

It’s a dangerous, demagogic logic. And you know the Bush administration is in trouble if they’re deploying it against firefighters who want to help hurricane victims. Next up — Tom Tomorrow’s prediction: “you’re with us, or you’re with the weather!”

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s Nancy Pelosi claiming that President Bush is even more clueless and out-of-touch than we thought:

At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”

She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

“He said ‘Why would I do that?’” Pelosi said.

“‘I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?’”

“Oblivious, in denial, dangerous,” she added.

Presidential medals of freedom all around!

The latest excuse for not firing failed horse association executive and FEMA director Michael Brown:

Mr. Bush also resisted renewed calls to fire Michael D. Brown, the director of FEMA, who became a lightning rod for attacks last week when he said he was unaware of a crisis at the New Orleans convention center, news of which had been televised for days. Instead, Mr. Bush accused critics of playing the “blame game” and said he would remain focused on the immediate crisis as evacuees fanned out across the country.

“We’ve got to solve problems; we’re problem-solvers,” he said. “There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong. What I’m interested in is helping save lives.”

We can all agree — the problem of not having enough firefighters in the background for President Bush’s photo-ops has been solved. Everything else… well, not so much.

Update 9/7: Here’s an example of Bush administration “problem solving” from CNN via Wonkette:

A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston.

But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away.

Don’t worry, though – Bush is going to investigate his own failure to adequately deal with Katrina!