Nonpartisan

[mmcirvin]

I take back most of my disagreement with Reid Stott. Judging from the first part of his essay, when he says "nonpartisan" he still means it literally, instead of the usual modern meaning of "stop criticizing politician X", which has so corrupted the term that I have a hard time taking it at face value. I also have doubts about Ray Nagin's sainthood, and it's only if you see the whole thing as a zero-sum Republicans vs. Democrats game that picking on Nagin really exonerates Bush (it seems pretty negative-sum to me).

But it's really, really hard to be nonpartisan when criticizing the federal government if one party controls everything. You have to go looking for some Democrats to criticize somewhere else to get that nonpartisan glow. Maybe I can rent myself out as a token Democrat to criticize when you want to be nonpartisan and are absolutely at wit's end. If we lose a few more thousand people because of federal incompetence, I can go out and say something offensive on the teevee for a reasonable fee while waving around my motor-voter form from the RMV with the party check box on it.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, of course everyone involved has been engaging in conscious blame-shifting. Josh Marshall's been trying to track down the origins of a false claim that Blanco didn't declare a state of emergency for days, which was repeated uncritically in several news outlets.

Probably a conflation

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

of Nagin's actual delay in ordering the evacuation with Rove's lame-ass attempt to blame Blanco for the delay in arrival of the troops.