Conservative Rationality - Not a Contradiction of Terms

There may be hope after all that logic will sometimes trump agenda. Of course it is probably only Bush and the GOP’s low poll numbers that led to these two reports countering the usual orchestrated Karl Rove message.

The Washington Post published a story based on an advance copy of the Congressional report on Katrina. The Democrats boycotted this effort but the Republicans appear to have gone forward courageously.

Here are some of the key quotes from the Post:

Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives.

A draft of the report, to be released publicly Wednesday, includes 90 findings of failures. Weaknesses identified by Sept. 11 investigators -- poor communications among first responders, a shortage of qualified emergency personnel and lack of training and funding -- doomed a response confronted by overwhelming demands for help.

"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership," the report's preface states. "In this instance, blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror."

The report said the single biggest federal failure was not anticipating the consequences of the storm. Disaster planners had rated the flooding of New Orleans as the nation's most feared scenario, testing it under a catastrophic disaster preparedness program in 2004.

Given ... warnings [that were received 56 hours earlier], the report notes Bush's televised statement on Sept. 1 that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," and concludes: "Comments such as those . . . do not appear to be consistent with the advice and counsel one would expect to have been provided by a senior disaster professional."

The council's "failure to resolve conflicts in information and the 'fog of war,' not a lack of information, caused confusion," the House panel wrote. It added that the crisis showed the government remains "woefully incapable" of managing information, much as it was before the 2001 attacks

In another striking news account, The Post reports that 450 Christian Churches are planning to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 197th birthday. 10,000 Christian clergy members from denominations including Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Congregationalists, United Church of Christ, and Baptists have a signed a letter that states:

We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.