NEVER BOTHERED HER MUCH EITHER:

Why is Bush facing this flood of vitriol? (BRIAN MONTEITH, 9/16/05, The Scotsman)

THERE was a time in the 1980s when anything that went wrong was immediately blamed on Margaret Thatcher. One only had to look out the bedroom window in the morning and, if it was raining, you would expect Michael Fish to blame the precipitation on the PM.

Her critics found it hard to deal with her and so every possible opportunity to blame her was seized upon with relish. Such behaviour revealed, to Thatcherites like me, just how once seemingly balanced broadcasters were in fact communists that slept under their beds instead of in them.

I've just come back from Fiji (via Los Angeles) where my only source of information about the appalling Hurricane Katrina has been CNN and BBC News 24 and, if you were to rely on their reports, President Bush should be impeached for dereliction of duty - if not simply thrown to the mercy of the mob in New Orleans (not that they would accept any mobs existed).

It did seem surreal that while Santa Monicans were going about their everyday business in the same country, a natural disaster on a huge scale - a flood the size of Britain - was unravelling. It is easy to forget just how vast the United States is and how difficult it actually was to comprehend the scale of the problem.

Still, the sheer bile coming out from politicians like the Reverend Jesse Jackson (that it was a plot against black people) and the tone of news reports displayed an ignorance or mendaciousness that I thought unwarranted.

You can't radically transform a political culture and be well-liked.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 16, 2005 6:33 AM