Assigning Blame
It’s easy to assign blame. Nobody in the whole Katrina mess has clean hands; what we’ve seen over the past couple weeks has been a trifecta of incompetence: Local, State, Federal.
I’ve said more than enough about the local and state levels (so, apparently, have local and state officials…). But on the federal level it also isn’t possible to ignore (for example) the effects of Bush’s appointments of underqualified cronies to posts in FEMA and elsewhere. At any level, the chain of command is also a chain of responsibility.
And yet, in our zeal to assign institutional blame (even where it is well-deserved), we may be ignoring an elephant in the room, which is not really about blame at all.
What do I mean? Cicero and Callimachus have written a set of thought-provoking posts. Read them.