Bush sings an old camptown spiritual for the folks dying in New Orleans while at a fund raiser waaaay far away from the disaster.
September 3, 2005
United States of Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
4 comments:
Sam
Gather your loins, organize your progressive friends, and take on these blithering idiots starting with Shrub.
Take some key lines from Maureen & Molly and redirect this country to where we really care about our fellow man and are willing to give them a leg up.
End this Reagan/John Wayne bullshit about the rugged individual.
The heartland of the Dixiecrats come Bible Thumping Republicans needs to be shown the door.
GWH
Here's some more material to fling at this gitar fiddlin'piss-head coke snorting jerk who barely remembers his time in N'Awlin's way back..an admission to the amount of grey matter he left on barroom floors across America...
American Caesar
ROSA BROOKS
September 3, 2005
NERO FIDDLED while Rome burned.
President Bush, who's not big on the classics, probably wasn't thinking about this when he mugged for the cameras Tuesday, playing a guitar presented to him by country singer Mark Wills.
But with the photo now Exhibit A for many liberal bloggers, he may find the comparison hard to shake.
True, while Bush enjoyed his vacation and strummed his new guitar, a great city was being devastated by water rather than fire.
And unlike the Emperor Nero, who was accused by the historian Suetonius of having deliberately started the fire that destroyed much of Rome in AD 64, no one is accusing President Bush of planning Hurricane Katrina.
But the Bush administration deserves substantial blame for the scale of the catastrophe in New Orleans.
An excellent article this week by Will Bunch in Editor & Publisher points out that it was the cost of the Iraq war that led the Bush administration to defund efforts to shore up the vulnerable city's levees.
After flooding in 1995 killed six people in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers started work on a massive civil engineering project designed to strengthen the region's levees and improve the pumping system that regulates water levels.
The work got off to a good start, but in 2003 federal funding started to run dry, leaving many projects — including a planned effort to strengthen the banks of Lake Pontchartrain — on the drawing board.
As early as 2004, the New Orleans Times-Picayune began to report that local officials and Army Corps of Engineers representatives attributed the funding cuts to the rising cost of the war in Iraq.
Facing record deficits, the Bush administration cut costs — and cut corners — by including in its 2005 budget only about a sixth of the flood-prevention funds requested by the Louisiana congressional delegation.
The war in Iraq also has made recovery from Katrina slower and more challenging. The Army National Guard units normally available for domestic disaster relief found rapid emergency response unusually difficult since so many of their personnel are deployed in Iraq. Although more units were dispatched later in the week, the manpower shortage was painfully evident during the crucial first hours.
The Iraq war is not the only reason for insisting that the Bush administration deserves some blame for the magnitude of the still-unfolding catastrophe.
After 9/11, the president promised that the nation would never again be so unprepared in the face of disaster. The Department of Homeland Security was created with a view to ensuring that every American city had adequate emergency plans in place for the kind of large-scale crisis that could accompany either a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.
It was an empty promise.
Four years after 9/11, the fiasco in New Orleans underscores our nation's ongoing inability to cope with serious threats.
Take public health, for example: Hurricane preparation plans — supposedly prepared with the involvement and approval of Homeland Security officials — were grossly inadequate for ensuring a continued supply of medication to the sick and for the evacuation of the ill and disabled, for cleaning up, ensuring safe drinking water or preventing the spread of disease.
With floodwaters, broken sewage pipes, damaged petrochemical pipelines and floating corpses all over the city, no one seemed to have a clear plan.
If a terrorist's bomb, rather than a hurricane, had destroyed a levee around Lake Pontchartrain, no one would hesitate to condemn the administration for its lackluster emergency planning and response.
And federal officials had more than a week's warning that a hurricane was on track for New Orleans — far more time than they'd likely have of a terrorist attack on critical infrastructure.
Not everything can be blamed on the Bush administration, of course, but for millions of Americans, the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is likely to stand as an indictment of Bush's false economies, empty promises and foolish priorities.
Consider Louisiana's wetlands, to take just one example. Policies associated with the administration exacerbated the geographical and ecological conditions for severe flooding. Over the decades, oil and gas company actions played a significant role in destroying the wetlands. Other factors also contributed, including residential development and, ironically, the overbuilding of some of the region's levees. But the "man-made" aspects of the disaster highlight the folly of the policies of unlimited development and environmental despoliation that the administration has so consistently embraced.
Two thousand years after his death, Nero's famous fiddling remains an allegory about feckless and selfcentered leadership in times of crisis.
Bush's guitar-playing antics in the face of the New Orleans devastation may doom him to a similar fate.
Get Him out Sam!!!
GWH
The bitter lessons of four years
Standing among the wreckage of two national disasters, it is no longer possible to deny the plain truth: Bush and his administration are unfit to wield power.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
Sept. 11, 2005 | It would have been almost impossible to imagine, during the days and weeks that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that we might someday look back on that depressing time with a tinge of nostalgia. For Americans, and especially for those of us who live in New York City, those autumn memories are filled with rage and horror, fire and smoke, loss and death; but they are also filled with a spirit of courage, community and real patriotism. United we stood, even behind a government of dubious legitimacy, because we knew that there was no other way to defend what we valued.
In a strange way, Sept. 11 -- despite all the instantaneous proclamations that things would never be the same -- represented a final moment of innocence.
Now catastrophe has befallen another American city, with horrors and losses that may surpass the toppling of the twin towers. And while many people in New Orleans have shown themselves to be brave, generous and decent, this season's disaster has instilled more dread than pride, more anger than unity. Why is the mood so different now? At every level, the vacuum of leadership was appalling, but especially among the national leaders to whom all Americans look at a time of catastrophic peril. As rising waters sank the city, summer vacations in Texas and Wyoming, and shoe-shopping on Madison Avenue, appeared to take priority over the suffering on the Gulf Coast.
Four years after 9/11, we know much more than we knew then about the arrogance, dishonesty, recklessness and incompetence of a national government that was never worthy of its power.
We saw how the White House squandered, all too quickly, the uplifting national response to 9/11. Within a few months, Karl Rove was heard telling the Republican National Committee exactly how he planned to betray the Democrats who had unanimously lined up behind President Bush in the aftermath of the attack by using the "war on terror" as a domestic political weapon.
Rove replayed his cynical maneuver at the GOP convention last year, when New York served as the backdrop for more patriotic posturing -- while the Republicans in the White House and Congress refused to provide adequate funding to protect New York from another, possibly even more devastating attack. Disproportionate millions went from the Department of Homeland Security to rural towns that will never be threatened, while city and state officials continue to lack the money and manpower to protect ports, power stations and chemical plants. The same neglectful and perverse priorities withdrew funding from the levees protecting New Orleans.
We learned how the Bush administration misled the nation into invading Iraq to suppress a nonexistent threat from "weapons of mass destruction," while assuring us that the war would be cheap, easy, and almost bloodless. The administration's predictions have proved uniformly false and its prescriptions entirely useless, costing thousands of Iraqi and American casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars. The resulting damage to our national prestige, among both allies and enemies, may well be irreparable. And after all the sorrow and destruction, Iraq may end up as a hellhole of warring ethnic and religious groups, a haven for Islamist terrorists, and an instrument of the mullah regime in Iran.
We found out why the president, the vice president, and their aides wanted no investigation of the circumstances leading to the 9/11 attacks. For nine months they'd ignored the warnings of danger, first from the former officials of the Clinton administration, then from White House national security officials, and finally from the CIA itself in the notorious presidential daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001.
More recently, we have discovered how they failed to act on an ominous report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, just weeks before 9/11, that pointed to the grave likelihood of a terrorist attack on New York City -- and of a deadly hurricane destroying New Orleans.
And we can have no doubt now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that critical agencies of the United States government are staffed by patronage hacks unable to fulfill the most basic responsibilities of the modern state. The outstanding example, of course, is Michael D. Brown -- apparently known as "Brownie" to the admiring president -- the FEMA chief whose résumé contains nothing to recommend him to one of the most critical positions in government, although he had amply padded it with unearned honors and bogus titles. He claimed, for instance, to have worked as an assistant city manager, when he was actually a glorified intern. (The holder of a degree from an unaccredited law school, Brown's most significant lifetime work experience was as a "commissioner" for a horse show association, a position he departed involuntarily and left off his official biography.)
In his pathetic insufficiency, Brown evidently was not alone at FEMA. The deputies and acting deputies and various other high-ranking pork-choppers -- many of whom had landed at the agency from positions with the Bush-Cheney campaign -- showed up with no experience in the hard work of saving lives and restoring communities.
But the FEMA phonies stand as symbols of far broader trouble in the Bush administration. When the Republicans first took over in 2001, and for many months thereafter, they assured us that they were the "grown-ups," and that they were "in charge." After 9/11, their flacks returned to this self-congratulatory theme, boasting that all Americans felt more secure and protected by Bush than they would if Al Gore were in the Oval Office. Their standard of accountability is to award the nation's highest decoration for public service to George Tenet and Jerry Bremer, as if nobody had noticed their notorious failures.
Pretenders such as these cannot extricate us from a debilitating war, nor can they rebuild the nation they destroyed; they have no idea how to allocate resources against terrorism, nor how to prepare for the disasters that will surely come. What the Republicans in power can do is set up photo ops, repeat spin points, concoct hollow slogans about "compassionate conservatism," and sidestep responsibility by whining about "the blame game."
On this anniversary, surrounded by the wreckage of four years of disastrously bad government, we must confront a profoundly disturbing reality. The performance of George W. Bush as president has proved to be far worse than even his most alienated critics could have predicted. His administration is far less concerned with our security than with its own self-serving ideology and its petty abuses of office.
Four years ago, as we contemplated potential threats from the enemies of civilization, it was impossible to conceive of the vast damage that our own government would inflict upon America before those enemies could strike again. The danger from the perpetrators of 9/11 has not abated, and suddenly we know how vulnerable we remain -- because the federal officials who have sworn to defend us, beginning with the president, have neither the character nor the competence to fulfill that oath.
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