Saddam's Execution: It's Just Like Hurricane Katrina?

January 7th, 2007 10:59 PM

One of the most overused anti-Bush analogies at this point in 2007 is Hurricane Katrina. Geoff Dickens found it even surfaced last Wednesday in reference to the rough cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution. MSNBC's "Hardball" crew found this comparative analogy to be not only logical, but delicious enough to repeat, as Geoff Dickens reported after watching last Wednesday's show. Reporter David Shuster found "critics" to make this odd connection:

"A White House spokesman later said President Bush has not yet seen the Saddam video. The images have been part of an international discourse for days. And critics say the President`s detachment is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, when the President didn’t appreciate the aftermath or public uproar until an adviser showed him a tape several crucial days later."

"Critics say"? How do we know this isn't what host Chris Matthews told him an hour before in the hallway? That qualifies as "critics say." Later in the show, Matthews repeated the attack line in a question to liberal Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida:

"Do you think it’s disturbing that the President of the United States, like he never saw what was going on in Katrina, never bothered to look at the tapes of that execution, to this moment has not bothered to look at them? See the problem over there?"