The General Accountability Office has just issued an assessment of the Bush administrations management of the Katrina disaster. (We’ll see the classy way the administration reacts to being held accountable in a moment.) On this story, as on so many others, the SCLM is clueless. They continue to be amazed—innocently amazed—that Republicans govern badly. What they assume is that Republicans want to govern well. Or at all. The lesson of Katrina is that Norquist and the rest of the Republican party succeeded in “drowning government in a bathtub”—along with a few thousand Americans. AP:

The White House had no clear chain of command in place, investigators with the Government Accountability Office said, laying much of the blame on President Bush for not designating a single official to coordinate federal decision-making for the Aug. 29 storm.

Remind you of anything? Read on:

Bush has [verbally kinda sorta] accepted responsibility for the government’s halting response, but for the most part then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, who quit days after the hurricane hit, has been the public face of the failures.

“That’s up to the president of the United States,” GAO Comptroller General David M. Walker told reporters after being asked whether Chertoff should have been the lead official during the emergency.

“It could have been Secretary Chertoff” or someone on the White House staff, Walker added. “That’s up to the president.”

This reminds me of Abu Ghraib. There, too, the chain of command was deliberately confused, to provide Bush plausible deniability if (when) the evidence of torture came to light. Domestically, a confused chain of command does that, and as a bonus, it wrecks the government. “Where is my government?” was the cry of a New Orleans citizen. “You’re on your own, kid. Good luck, and here’s a Bible,” is the Republican response. Making government not work isn’t an accident; it’s part of ideologically-driven Republican strategy.

And as a lagniappe, here’s a typical Republican reaction to being held accountable. (Remember, His Royal Lieness Himself changed the name of the G.A.O. from the Government Accountng Office to the Government Accountability Office. Via MSGOP:

Responding, a Homeland Security Department spokesman attacked the GAO’s preliminary findings as “premature and unprofessional.”

C-l-a-s-s-y!

NOTE That was also the quote in the original AP feed I read at lunch. The quote was watered down later on, to read:

The Homeland Security Department angrily responded to the GAO report, calling the preliminary findings a publicity stunt riddled with errors.

What, no direct quotatoin any more? I wonder why?