Lots of email sharing this sentiment, if not this tone:

Re: Gale Force Exaggeration. You are almost Schumer-like in your own hypocrisy. You say Pres Bush did not restore order. Wrong. He did cause order to be restored. It just took longer than we all would have preferred. There is a big difference between being late to cause something to happen and not causing it to happen at all. Where you and so so many journalists err is in flatly declaring “Bush didn’t do (fill in the blank)”. In every single case where I’ve read these asinine statements, Bush did or caused to be done whatever was at issue … in some cases is just didn’t happen quickly enough to satisfy. But to declare it didn’t happen at all is a BIG FLAT LIE which all of you frickin’ (to borrow a Nagin adjective) journalists continue to do. We the conservative people don’t expect this of National Review journalists. But it seems even you guys have major credibility restoration work to accomplish.
Straighten up your act Jonah. You’re good (usually). Don’t blow it with loose and erroneous statements. We’re holding all of you to a higher standard than perhaps you are accustomed.

Me: If you read that column, it’s pretty clear that A) I think columnists such as myself deserve some of the blame B) That Louisiana politicians deserve most of the blame. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think it is a scandal the press isn’t demanding a resignation from Nagin and Blanco. But what seems to bother a lot of readers is that Bush should be blamed for anything at all.

Specifically, people object to this passage from the column:

The president isn’t blameless either. The initial response to Katrina was a mess. We’ll have plenty of time to debate how much of a mess and who was responsible. But it’s a political fact that when the media was hysterical and local leadership behaving abysmally, Bush did not successfully impose order. That’s something he’d have to do in the wake of terrorist attack, and it’s something he should have done with Katrina.

Now, I posted just below that I thought the reader made a good case for the differences between Katrina and a terrorist attack. But beyond that qualification, I don’t see what’s wrong with the above. Note the phrase “political fact.” Who can dispute that this was a political calamity? Certainly not anyone from the White House, which is sending Bush to New Orleans almost daily. Certainly not Bush who apologized.

It seems to me many Bush defenders take the White House’ impressive media operation for granted. Whatever the merits of the federal response on the ground, the political reality is that Bush got caught flat-footed, with a tin ear, on this one. The press is always hostile to Bush. Normally the White House works around that fact. This time they played into it. If Bush did everything perfectly, why is he in the political mess he’s in? If you want to say because of a partisan media, fine go ahead and make that argument. But at least acknowledge that this time around Bush allowed the partisan media to portray him in a way that has permanently damaged his presidency and will cost us untold billions in extra expenditures because the White House feels the need to compensate. Political failures are also, on occasion, leadership failures as well.