Bush's Autumn of Discontent

...This became a crisis of confidence, not only in agencies and officials, but in the whole concept of national government...

...It was the first such action since Soviet times...

...Putin offered to airlift Russian aid to Louisiana...

...I hope he won't be too hard on himself...

...When the Dikes Broke What it means to live below sea level, dependent on protective barriers, I first learned on February 1,1953...

...He had also organized the wartime feeding of Belgium after it was overrun by the Germans, and he organized shipments of food for starving millions in central Europe...

...Standing atop a great dike south of Rotterdam, I could see the water lapping up on one side...

...Hoover had worked at engineering in China...

...A Crisis of Confidence Former Defense Secretary and Senator William S. Cohen (R.-Me...

...Times executives...

...I remember, too, the veritable torrent of relief supplies that poured in from the United States and other countries to a point that the queen went on the air to announce that some would be sent on to needy developing countries...

...Plenty, plenty," he replied...

...They would repair the dikes and dry out the land...

...Katrina from Abroad In a way that did not happen after 9/11, America after Katrina presents a weaker face to the world...

...Hoover quickly assessed what needed to be done...

...First, an argument concerning the division of authority while people are dying...

...What is new are the impending signs that its strength is ebbing...

...By contrast...

...The Ministry of the Interior, apparently after doing some boning up on the First Amendment, said in a formal statement that ajournalist's right to keep sources secret is a part of the press freedom mechanism in a democratic society...

...Columnist George F. Will wrote that the nomination "is not a defensible exercise of Presidential discretion...

...Once he finally began making repeated visits to the Louisiana and Mississippi flood-stricken area to ride herd over the belated Federal action, Bush defensively asked Americans to put off the "blame game," promising his own investigation of what went wrong with the Federal response to Katrina...

...who are promoting a Federal shield law to protect reporters...

...Iran has a nuclear development program that it insists is for peaceful energy purposes...

...All I had to do was call in Main Street itself...

...Media tycoons have gone to jail for offenses that are commonplace, like tax evasion...

...But on September 30, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was held for contempt because she refused on principle to cooperate with the investigation of who leaked the identity of Valerie Piarne, a CIA undercover officer, suddenly switched gears...

...In vain did we try to explain that CBS News had no connection with CBS Entertainment...

...It tells us however strong and powerful we think we are, we are nothing in the eyes of nature and of God Almighty...

...and surprisingly, one current member of the Administration, UN Ambassador John R. Bolton...

...But he entrusted a vast and complicated relief effort to lawyers—Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Brown...

...The Ministry of the Interior stated that the interview amounted to propagandizing terrorism...

...He got the FEMA post on the recommendation of his old chum and predecessor Joseph Allbaugh, who was the President's national campaign manager and who left FEMA to create a lobbying firm...

...Neither of them, nor any of their top aides, had any experience to speak of in managing a large-scale emergency project, as the chaotic early days showed...

...The interview had been obtained by a freelance Russian journalist...

...You've got hours," he said...

...Eight years earlier, the Dutch had been liberated from Nazi occupation...

...The main networks have been brought under government control...

...A Russian editor for Forbes magazine was murdered...

...and Christopher J. Dodd (D.-Conn...

...Having to deal simultaneously with North Korea and Iran—which sometimes seem to be playing off each other—does not make that task any easier...

...As television showed poor blacks abandoned in New Orleans, while middle-class whites evacuated in their cars, the Administration found it necessary to dispatch Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Alabama to refute charges of discriminatory behavior in the rescue effort— without much effect...

...The eclectic, presumably supportive group included former Senator (R.-Kan...

...William Safire, retired Times columnist...

...That is a 50 per cent increase in the cumulative debt from all of the country's previous history, including several wars...

...on the other, 15 feet below, lay fertile farm land and a group of farmers who showed no signs of evacuating...

...For the United States to face countries critical of its strength is no novelty...

...This is my home...

...Newsweek described a "strange paralysis" as Bush officials sought to define who was responsible for what...

...Meanwhile, his legislative agenda lies dead in the water, and some Republicans in the House are preparing to challenge him on the issue of meeting the massive costs of post-Katrina reconstruction...

...As the Chicago Tribune reported, the USS Bataan, a well-equipped support ship with water, medicine and operating rooms, lay for several days anchored off the Gulf Coast without orders...

...and GOP Presidential candidate Robert J. Dole...

...In ajob that calls for a high degree of professionalism, Brown's previous experience was overseeing horse shows...

...And yet, the Bush administration appears to regard Iran as the greater menace...

...Now they had been invaded by their most ancient enemy, the sea...

...In 1958 the CBS bureau in Moscow, which I had opened, was ordered closed by Nikita S. Khrushchev's government...

...But that does not appear to be the case...

...And you haven't got months to do it...

...In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that may have tobe amended, "and then your friend may turn out to be dysfunctional...

...But disputes like the current argument—about whether the statement of principles signed at the six-nation negotiations in Beijing on September 19 calls for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program before or after it is given a light-water reactor—are not new...

...Before Katrina, the country's worst deluge was the great Mississippi flood of 1927, and it left behind some lessons President Bush could have usefully applied in response to the latest catastrophe...

...But I can still remember Queen Juliana in boots, visiting stricken areas, wading through water, distributing food and clothing...

...An editorial in the Wall Street Journal called it a "faith-based nomination" and added, "Only Mr...

...Press freedom, generally speaking, has not fared well in post-Soviet Russia...

...Its new hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, delivered a fire-breathing speech to the United Nations General Assembly, asserting Iran's right to pursue nuclear energy and accusing the U.S...

...Miller will surely be encouraged to know that she had a strong sympathizer in the Kremlin...

...I drove down to south Holland...

...It was in a rage because a Playhouse 90 production, The Plot to Kill Stalin, suggested Khrushchev was complicit in Stalin's death...

...The reference was to Judith Miller's incarceration for refusal to disclose a confidential source...

...In developing countries America's image was tamished by the issues of race and poverty that the flood raised...

...Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, has written, "The Miers nomination looks like the latest act of an overly insular, increasingly offkey White House...

...Other journalists have been beaten...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Bush's Autumn of Discontent At his October 4 news conference, President George W. Bush was asked how much was left of the political capital he had said he earned with his re-election...

...What happens when decision-making in a dire emergency is left to political amateurs...

...Negotiations with Iran are off for the foreseeable future...

...The organization Reporters Without Borders has labeled Putin a "predator of press freedom...

...The Bush Administration is trying to repair the damage done to relations with North Korea by the angry controversy over the agreement announced in Beijing...

...He said through a spokesperson that visiting Miller had nothing to do with his job...

...The bureau stayed closed for two years...

...Bush seems to know much about Harriet Miers'constitutional views...

...That may not be readily apparent when the government in Pyongyang accuses the United States of trying to "crush us to death...

...Working in Holland as a freelance correspondent for the New York Times, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a call from a Dutch colleague who said the dikes that had safeguarded a third of the country for centuries were in danger from the combined effect of a violent North Sea storm and freak high tides...

...What happens, too, is that Wal-Mart tries to deliver three truckloads of waterto Jefferson Parish and they are waved away by FEMA...

...How it will affect America's major creditors—Japan, China and Britain—remains to be seen...

...We are also learning the hard way about the cost of entrusting emergency response to the political cronies and contributors who people the Bush Administration...

...We are learning the hard way about the cost of stinting on infrastructure to pay for tax cuts and the war in Iraq...

...This looks more like the autumn of Bush's discontent, and increasingly his problems are with those who have been his most stalwart supporters...

...Nevertheless, this denouement was somewhat mystifying, since Judge Thomas Hogan had announced as early as July 6 that the source had agreed to be named...

...One of them yelled back, "Where should I go...

...Watching the President at his Rose Garden press conference as he insisted he has plenty of political capital, it occurred to me that he doesn't seem to swagger as much as he used to, perhaps with good reason...

...No matter...

...Then they would build a huge sea wall connecting the Zeeland Islands to shut out the North Sea...

...That was completed in 1998,45 years after the devastating flood...

...I flew on an American Army helicopter picking desperate people from rooftops and trees...

...In any event, Congress will undoubtedly examine not only the chaotic initial reaction to the flood, but why the White House cut back so sharply on funding for levees and infrastructure...

...Senators Arlen Specter (R.-Pa...

...He's desperate not to give offense," declared the usually approving Washington Times...

...Until then, for a half-hour a day, in 10minute segments, Miller was allowed to receive visitors...

...At a meeting of the socially conservative Family Research Council, complaints were voiced that the organization was being asked to endorse a blank slate...

...And once again they fought back...

...A different element of American weakness lay in the fast-mounting cost of dealing with the disaster...

...As I write, in fact, the six-party negotiations scheduled to resume in November still appear to be on...

...President Calvin Coolidge, himself not much of an activist, entrusted the job of dealing with the inundation of thousands of square miles in the lower Mississippi to his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, who proved to be precisely the man for the job...

...This despite many warnings, notably from the New Orleans Times-Picayune three years ago, that the legendary seaport's levees and flood walls were fragile...

...of trying to divide the world into "light and dark countries...

...The President's reluctance to release Miers' White House files to the Senate Judiciary Committee could well be cited by the Democrats as the "extraordinary circumstance" that justifies a filibuster...

...Trained as a mining engineer...

...He told a group of visiting scholars, "I look at this and cannot believe my eyes...

...Nuclear Nuances North Korea is believed to have six to eight nuclear bombs, or the makings for them...

...The dikes and the windmills that powered the pumps had proved inadequate to cope with the storm surge, so the Dutch hydraulic engineers planned their counteroffensive...

...He visited 91 communities, mobilized everything from medical facilities to dining halls, and told them to get ready for thousands of evacuees...

...Moreover, at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, the U.S...

...In the Weekly Standard, editor William Kristol lamented the President's "cronyism and capitulation...

...On NBC television Aaron Broussard, president of the parish, dissolved in sobs as he accused the Federal government of the "worst abandonment of Americans...

...is credited with the quip, "Government is the enemy until you need a friend...

...former White House adviser Richard A. Clarke...

...How different from the 9/11 atmosphere, when Americans flew their flags and rallied to a President speaking through a bullhorn at New York's ground zero...

...The nomination of White House Legal Counsel Harriet E. Miers for the Supreme Court has become another source of contention among conservatives...

...The greatest challenge for big-power diplomacy today is nonproliferation, keeping the door to the nuclear club shut...

...The Russians seem to be sensitive to such criticism and recently they found a response...

...Republicans as well as Democrats demand to know about positions Miers has taken as White House legal counsel...

...Putin, who incidentally is a television fan, was not amused...

...In the ensuing days, hundreds of thousands from south Holland and the Zeeland Islands were evacuated with the aid of the Allied forces in Germany...

...He went on the radio to raise S15 million for the Red Cross...

...I would rather drown here...

...Putin Strikes Back I had that old déjà vu feeling when ABC News was barred by Vladimir Putin's government from operating in Russia...

...Among its other effects, the 1927 flood started a migration of hundreds of thousands of African-Americans from the flooded area to Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles...

...ABC's sin, in the Kremlin's eyes, was broadcasting on Nightline an interview with the Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, who has a $ 10 million Russian price on his head...

...I yelled to them to warn of the danger of the rising water...

...Some 1,800 Netherlanders drowned...

...The Miller Mystery Wearing a jumpsuit and working in a prison laundry, the most famous woman prisoner since Martha Stewart stood fast for 85 days...

...Miller agreed to testify before the grand jury on the ground that her source— I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had given permission to name him...

...So now we know officially what we had only surmised before—that a plot was hatched in the Vice President's office to blacken the name of ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, who had the temerity to write in the New York Times that the Administration was inventing an Iraqi effort to buy African uranium in order to help justify an invasion ofIraq...

...Hoover's handling of the flood helped him win nomination and election as President in 1928.1 doubt that the management of Katrina will burnish many reputations...

...Michael D. Brown, who was forced to resign as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)— yet somehow is still on the payroll as a consultant—spent a lot of time on television explaining to aroused interlocutors why he was about the last to know of the thousands of citizens languishing in the New Orleans Convention Center...

...Hoover later reflected, "I suppose I could have called in the whole of the Army, but what was the use...

...A headline in the English-language Moscow News blared: "Russians Quick to Criticize U.S...

...She had at times covered his activities, and in September 2003 had advance word of his testimony on Syria to a House committee...

...Hypocrisy...

...Iran, too rich in oil to be starved out, acts as though it is engaged in an international holy war, out of motives more ideological than economic...

...Russia's President Vladimir V Putin, a frequent White House target on matters like Chechnya and human rights, found a way to chide President Bush over Katrina...

...pressed for action in the Security Council, despite the likelihood of a Russian or Chinese veto...

...David Broder of the Washington Post foresees $3 trillion of additional national debt in four years...