Success Quote by Jeff Sessions

Sessions is doing the politician’s version of triage: spread the blame wide enough that no single wound looks fatal. The line sounds like accountability, but it’s engineered to be non-accountable. “Failures enough to go around” turns a potentially indictable chain of decisions into a communal shrug, a buffet of missteps where everyone can take a plate and nobody has to pay the bill. The phrase is folksy on purpose, an Alabama porch cadence repurposed for national crisis management.

“In retrospect” is the quiet tell. It doesn’t mean “we were wrong”; it means “we can now narrate events safely, with the benefit of distance and reduced liability.” It relocates error to the past tense and implies the real problem was clarity, not judgment. Then Sessions uses a neat temporal symmetry - “before the storm” / “after the storm” - to imply inevitability. If failures happened on both sides of the event, the event itself starts to read like an act of nature rather than a test of governance.

The context is the post-disaster autopsy that Washington always performs: assign fault without assigning consequence. “The storm” (whether a literal hurricane like Katrina or a broader crisis framed as weather) works as a rhetorical alibi. Nature becomes the antagonist; bureaucracy merely stumbled. The subtext is preservation: of institutions, of agencies, of political careers. It’s a sentence built to absorb outrage, not to answer it.