Former Time Magazine political reporter John Dickerson has joined the staff of Slate Magazine, bringing with him a wealth of inside-the-beltway experience and sources which he put to good use in his excruciatingly stupid Slate debut. The theme? How Bush can surmount the political fallout created by letting tens of thousands of desperate Katrina victims rot, many of them literally, for a week.

Of course Dickerson, with his sophisticated understanding of the political process, doesn’t put it quite that way; he says the president needs to “turn around the perception that he’s failed.” And so far as he’s concerned, the jury is very much out on whether the perception, bolstered as it is by every available bit of evidence, is accurate.

George Bush is finally on the case. Criticized for his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, he and his aides are anxious to show that they’ve taken the wheel and that their knuckles are white from steering. The president has now visited the soggy Delta landscape twice. The vice president is headed there Thursday. The first lady will visit schoolchildren again. Bush’s schedule today was clotted with Katrinalia—he met with his Cabinet, volunteer organizations, displaced students, and congressional leaders. Tonight, Cabinet officials will brief Hill leaders. More quietly, White House surrogates are talking about failures at the state and local levels. Several Bush allies have e-mailed me pictures of the unused buses soaking in New Orleans.

It’s apparent from Dickerson’s stylistic excesses that if he left Time voluntarily, it was because he was chafing under the tyranny of the style book. “Knuckles white from steering.” “Soggy Delta landscape.” (Soggy? Soggy? A wet napkin is soggy; the Delta is fucking drowned, John, awash in toxic sludge and littered with corpses.) “Clotted with Katrinalia;” that’s a good little riff, puts the reader in mind of someone who goes a bit overboard with collector plates or Beanie Babies. Meeting with Cabinet officials, volunteers, schoolkids, Congress, telling the Cabinet to meet with Congress … the poor guy must be exhausted.

Especially piquant is Dickerson’s characterization of administration officials “quietly” sliming the locals. Filtered through the pathology of Beltway pundits, “quietly” means “anonymously.” You can be liberally quoted lying on the front page of national powerhouses like the Washington Post and Newsweek, but so long as you’re anonymous it’s as if you’re whispering. And of course Dickerson does his bit for the slime effort with the context-free observation that unnamed “Bush allies” have gone so far as to email him photos of unused buses in New Orleans, no doubt in the hope that Dickerson would mention the photos, which of course he obligingly did. But not, you see, in the interest of furthering the “don’t blame us” campaign; he’s simply reporting the incident.

And that’s just the first paragraph. From there, Dickerson plunges headlong up the administration’s ass, shivering in awe at the president’s decision to lead an investigation of his own murderous incompetence and praising the president and DHS chief Michael Chertoff, who has been lying straight time for days, for their wisdom in delaying any investigation until after the incompetencies cease to matter. Because, you see, firing themselves might hinder the relief effort.

Bush has even pledged to lead an investigation into what went wrong. This is no small matter. Such backward-looking is out of character for a president who believes that leadership means moving forward. Under less fraught circumstances, he’s known to mock Monday morning quarterbacks: the media, the professors, the French who moan opinions about what he or his administration should do. “Oh no, here come the hand-wringers,” he sometimes jokes to aides he thinks listen too much to the “echo chamber.”
…

But the investigation won’t happen quickly. The president and his head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, are right to argue that quick reprisals won’t help with the business of digging out and rebuilding. For the moment, people need food and a future more than finger-pointing. But images of rescuers piloting bloated bodies out of soaked houses will fill the news in the coming weeks. Draining the city will take months. The roar of the displaced demanding answers will not die down.

So those lucky enough to survive the storm and the bungled response to it now have to place what’s left of their lives in the same hands that almost cost them their lives in the first place because … well, because. And did you catch that little dig at “the French who moan opinions? ” Yea, verily, like “Don’t invade Iraq because it’s a really fucking bad idea.” Moan, moan, moan. Learning from your mistakes is, like, so very.

But even that’s not imbecilic enough for Dickerson; he’s determined to push on until someone’s sphincter chokes the very life from his body. After asking what Bush can do to reverse his fortunes, he kills off a couple of standard Bush options. First to die is Tinkerbell (“I do believe in fairies, I do, I do!”).

His own sunny optimism, which even he seemed to find unsatisfying, is unlikely to help at this point. “Out of this despair is going to come a vibrant coast,” he told residents of Poplarville, Miss., Monday. “I understand if you’re saying to yourself, well, it’s hard for me to realize what George W. is saying because I’ve seen the rubble and I know what has happened to my neighbors. But I’d like to come back down here in about two years and walk your streets and see how vital this part of the world is going to be. I can’t wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs. That’s what I think is going to happen.”

And joining Tink in her watery grave is Grandpa Walton.

Bush’s ability to empathize, so effective with military families, has seemed off tone on the Gulf Coast. His fantasies about sitting on the fresh timber of Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott’s rebuilt porch were no match for footage of stunned faces poking through escape holes torn in rooftops.

Well, yeah, you could say that. You could say that joshing about hanging out on a brand new porch with Dixiecrat nostalgist Trent Lott, who will be supervising the construction from his second home, seems “off tone” when contrasted with footage of desperate hurricane victims. It’s even more off tone in contrast with the actual people, some of whom are likely dead now. So that’s probably a good call. Good call, John. Now watch this drive.

Dickerson has now stripped Bush of his two primary resources: callousness and false empathy. (I mean, seriously: Trent Lott? Empathy?) What then, is a naked president to do, short of calling off his attack weasels and resigning?

The answer — and don’t laugh, this is serious, top-flight Washington insider stuff here — is make himself and others in his administration accountable.

It seems an impossible task, getting the concepts of “Bush” and “accountability” together on the same page without bringing about the end of the universe, but Dickerson pulls it off with impressive nonchalance and only a bit of legerdemain.

But if the president really wants to turn around the perception that he’s failed, he has a better option than belated hyperactivity and spin: Bush should put his own prestige on the line by appearing in an unscripted public forum to answer questions about the government’s response to the disaster. He should schedule a press conference, or, better yet, a town hall meeting with residents. The directors of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security can join him onstage, if they’d like, but this president who likes bold action should promise that he will be the one doing the talking. George Bush knows that political capital is built by risk. His approval ratings are at their lowest mark. A majority of Americans have doubts about his stewardship of the Iraq war. Standing alone on a stage would be a gamble that could quiet those pesky hand-wringers—”I’ll answer your questions soon enough, now grab a shovel”—and provide some kind of psychic relief for the frustrated and helpless stranded miles away from the marinating streets on which they once lived.

“Marinating streets?” Marinating brain.The thought of George W. Bush standing, unscripted, in an intimate setting filled with people who have suffered unimaginably from his incompetence, is the product of an asphyxiated mind; you have to think that at this point Dickerson is operating purely on instinct and hypnotically implanted messages. And so it proves:

The president is almost evangelical about his theory of management: Pick good people, give them power, and then hold them accountable. He never designed an administration around mistake-admitting; he did build it on accountability. Delegation without accountability leads to rot.

Great god almighty: so that’s what smells. Setting aside the superficial similarities between “mistake-admitting” and what I like to call “accountability-holding,” George Bush has never held anyone in his administration accountable for anything other than telling the truth. Lawrence Lindsay got fired for accurately estimating that the Iraq war would cost $100 billion or more (and possibly for doing so while fat). Paul O’Neill got fired for telling the truth (and possibly for dancing with Bono, which would be legitimate grounds for termination). On the other hand, everybody who fucks up gets promoted where possible and tongue-bathed where not. And Dickerson acknowledges as much before he blurts out that hallucinatory description of the president’s guiding managerial principle.

Bush finds it hard to pin the blame on someone who has stood next to him for any length of time. “He has a very strong feeling for anyone who has been in the foxhole with him,” says a former aide. “Especially when they’re under fire.” He refused Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s two offers of resignation after abuses were discovered at Abu Ghraib. He bestowed the nation’s highest civilian honor on the CIA director who told him that the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” He continues to stand by Karl Rove though his top aide helped steer reporters to the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

Foxhole. Under fire. The PR war is hell.

To review: We have here a writer who chronicles a portion of the president’s unblemished five-year accountability-free streak, and who then insists that the president’s bedrock governing principle is accountability. Ho, bruddah: Put down the Sterno and slowly back away.

But wait! There’s more! The real kicker here — and this is where the legerdemain comes in — is that Dickerson isn’t suggesting Bush hold himself accountable for the circumstances that led to all this clotting of Katrinalia, but that he take the unprecedented step of blaming one of his employees for it.

Will Michael Brown be held accountable? Administration officials defend him. The president offered a typically folksy pat on the back after his first visit to Biloxi. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” he said.

Not all the president’s allies think so. “Someone has to get fired,” says a top aide to a Republican senator, describing the work ahead for GOP leaders in Congress. Right now, he continued, “There are two jobs: writing checks and figuring out who gets fired.”

In other words, Dickerson’s idea of a bold, risky, principled approach to taking responsibility for the death and misery caused by the botched relief effort is to stand Bush up in front of a bunch of Katrina victims so the president can point at Michael Brown and say, “He did it.” And in Dickerson’s mind, this constitutes incisive political analysis.

All this without naming a single source.

In recent years, Slate has been best known for preserving what remains of Christopher Hitchens’ shrinking habitat while having the words “Ahmad Chalabi” surgically excised from the recovering Trotskyite’s brain. Well, move over, Hitch: There’s a new fool in town.

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