On the second (web)page of their article, "How Bush Blew It", Newsweek writers, seeking a nice, neat, compare-and-contrast trope, repeat a bit of Republican-spun conventional wisdom. Here's the quote: "The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina -- like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11 -- was a failure of imagination."
There are a couple things wrong with this. First, the government's failed response to Katrina was not a failure of imagination; it was a failure to turn on the fucking television! Images provided, no imagination required! Of course what it really was was a failure to care, a failure to feel meaningfully connected to what was happening to other Americans, to other human beings. The only Biblical ethos at play there was Cain's moi? moment: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
Second, the war in Iraq, by which I assume they mean the reason for it, was not a
failure of intelligence. It was a failure of honesty in the use of intelligence and a grotesque willingness to manipulate and corrupt the emotions that flowed from 9/11 in order to achieve unrelated ends. It was not an intelligence failure.
This kind of apparently innocuous, in-passing repetition of Bush-spin is very insidious, as it reflects and reinforces a false conventional wisdom, which unfortunately serves as the primary basis for most people's voting decisions. We need to be on the look out for it and expose it for what it is whenever and wherever it emerges, particularly when it appears in high-profile organs like Newsweek.