True or False or Both?

[ChoralScholar]

by John Brummett
Arkansas Times


We make a basic mistake on many of our political questions. We couch them as either-or.

Was Kenneth Starr a partisan and abusive prosecutor or was Bill Clinton a chronic dissembler even under oath?

Actually, the best answer is yes, both.

Is the Bush administration widely failed at home and abroad or will the Republicans likely maintain congressional majorities in the midterm elections, and the presidency beyond?

Yes, both.

Now a debate percolates on whether our federal government failed so thoroughly and spectacularly after Hurricane Katrina because the key people were incompetent or because the organizational structure was bureaucratically impossible.

Again, we should not constrain ourselves artificially. The answer is yes, both. And it's more.

Michael Brown was a self-aggrandizing, camera-hungry political hack wholly unqualified to run FEMA. Michael Chertoff earned his Republican points by which he became head of Homeland Security, thus overseer of FEMA, not with any expertise either in police or emergency management work. Chertoff earned them in 1993 as a partisan prosecutor for the Senate committee then headed by Al D'Amato that first tried to make something criminal of Clinton's goofy and failed business investment in Jim McDougal's Whitewater land scheme.

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http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2006/02/21/JohnBrummett/334308.html