The Republicans’ campaign to gin up outrage over AIG bonuses has at least two purposes, neither of which has anything to do with bonus caps. Their over-arching motive is to damage the Democrats at any cost. In the short term, however, Republicans are agitating about the bonuses to shift public attention from the fact that it was their “trickle up,” anti-regulatory ideology that caused the U.S. economy to crash.

The GOP’s blame-shifting campaign now has striking similarities to the tactics they deployed — quite successfully — to silence calls for investigations and even impeachment of George Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In September 2005, as the floodwaters in the streets of New Orleans receded and calls for investigations into the Bush administration’s failed response to the disaster rose, these same Republicans successfully staved off political retribution by trivializing Democrats’ calls for accountability as “playing the blame game.”

The tactic was hatched in the White House political office, then under the direction of Karl Rove. It was first floated by former Pres. George H. W. Bush on CNN’s Larry King on the first Monday night after the storm, on Sept. 5, 2005. “The media has a fascination with the blame game,” Poppy told King, “and instead of looking for what can we do to help now there’s a lot of why didn’t we do something different?”

The next day, it was power of repetition to flog the “blame game” theme:

McClellan told reporters six times that their questions about how the government failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amounted to a “blame game.” Twice he used the twisted neologism “blame gaming,” as in: “The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later.”

For the next three or four news cycles, Bush’s foot soldiers in Congress crowded the airways repeating the magic words “blame game” as often as possible. The messaging quickly found permeated the media. A New York Times headline read, “After Failures, Government Officials Play Blame Game.”

In a column on Sept. 9, the late great Molly Ivins connected the dots between the Republicans’ systematic destruction of FEMA, the federal response agency, and the cascading disaster after FEMA failed to respond in New Orleans after Katrina swept through:

First, [the Bush team] announced repeatedly they don’t want to “play the blame game.” Then, they start blaming everybody else. According to The New York Times, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, White House communications director, began a campaign this weekend to blame local and state officials. The “woefully inadequate response,” said “sources close to the White House,” was the fault of “bureaucratic obstacles from state and local officials.”

Republicans are masters at message discipline — a dark art liberals are too independent-minded to master — so it is not surprising that the “blame game” tactic worked remarkably well for Bush and the Republicans back then. By the time the Republican-controlled Congress finally got around to holding hearings on Katrina, the public had mostly moved on. While no one was ever officially held accountable for the disaster, analysts on the right and the left agree that the government’s failure on Katrina led to a drop in Bush’s polling from which he never recovered.

There are striking similarities between then and now. The failures of Katrina were caused, in part, by Republican anti-government policies that systematically hobbled FEMA. In the current crisis, the Bush recession was brought on by GOP anti-government policies launched in the Reagan era that systematically defanged regulations on the financial industry.

But today, it’s the Republicans who are playing the blame game, and they are doing it with a vengance. They are kicking up as much dust as they can — demanding to know who removed the codicil in the TARP bill that would have restricted bonuses for executives at companies on the taxypayer’s dole, suggesting that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner be fired.

Off the top, it’s a wonder anyone is paying attention to them. It’s not like they are offering an alternative plan, and they’re only real option is come out, as party boss Rush Limbaugh has, strongly in favor of using taxpayer money to pay millions in bonuses to reward finance executives for creating a historic economic failure.

And yet 113 of the 198 Republicans in the House voted yesterday against taxing these same bonuses at a rate of 90 percent. That may well turn out to be a very stupid move — just ask the 85 Republicans who risked the wrath of anti-government types like Grover Norquist and voted to raise the fatcat’s taxes.

As silly as all this seems, Democrats should take the Republicans’ antics seriously. It was blamestorming tactics like these that they deployed in the first two years of the Clinton administration — with Travelgate, Filegate. etc. etc. — that successfully agitated sufficient voter outrage to help them win the House in 1994.

What makes it doubly worrisome is that playing the blame game now, albeit in reverse, is working just as well now as did during the Katrina crisis three and a half years ago.