Joe Lieberman Hearts W’s Nads

“I think the system failed the President.”
-Joe Lieberman, discussing the Katrina hearings

Can you believe this sniveling shit? I was watching the interview while I worked, so I know what I heard wasn't some snippet taken out of context by a malevolent, liberty-hating free press. No, this was stalwart Democratic war supporter Joe Lieberman opining at Senatorial length on CNN this morning. The summation was a showstopper:

“The system failed the President.” As explicit an example of ball-lickery current broadcast standards allow on the public airways.

The 'system' didn't fail ME, or Anderson Cooper, or even the usually reliably supportive Fox's Shepard Smith. By not being 100% completely disconnected with anybody's reality but our own (textbook definition of “sociopathy,” by the way) we knew what was happening to New Orleans as it was happening and gnashing our teeth about our impotence to do anything about it.

The President is the one guy in the country with the clout to pick up a phone and literally directly cause things to happen, and he does fuck all for the better part of a week because… well, that would be conjecture on my part, and I'm trying to be reasonable.

If there hadn't been live, real-time, 24 hour-a-day multichannnel TV coverage and screaming headlines on page one every day that week, the argument could be made, perhaps, that the 'system' had failed the President. During the Polk administration, say, this assertion could easily have been put forth and taken wing.

But with Katrina, even if the system failed the President, it's not like the evidence wasn't out there for all the world to see. Whatever the reason, and who knows if we'll ever truly know, the simple fact is the one man who could have picked up the phone and demanded action didn't.

That's not a failure of the system, that's a failure of the President.