By INCITES BY ED SILVERSTEIN
Anyone — I repeat — anyone, who still approves of President Bush after his response to Hurricane Katrina must fall into one of the following categories: 1. Someone who was severely deprived of oxygen in the womb. 2. A corporate CEO who has earned record bonuses by decimating the environment and creating conditions favorable to category five hurricanes. 3. Those who don’t necessarily care too much about the plight of the poor people. 4. Anyone who still holds to the myth that Fox News is “news.” 5. Anyone who accepts that Katrina was the hand of God smashing sinful New Orleans while being unmindful of the collateral damage inflicted on true believers in Alabama and Mississippi.
Katrina is proof of Bush’s failure at every level.
Prior to the hurricane, Bush took steps that guaranteed that this natural disaster would turn into a national disgrace. Our exploding debt, caused by a fraudulent war in Iraq, massive tax cuts to the wealthy and giant giveaways to profitable corporations, forced the president to cut funding for desperately needed infrastructure. This included money for the repair and maintenance of the levees in New Orleans that ultimately failed.
Further, the president has viewed all federal agencies, other than those that boost business or religion, with scorn. Nowhere was this more clearly displayed than in his treatment of FEMA. The agency was demoted from cabinet level and folded into the already unmanageable Homeland Security Department. In addition to adding an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy to a rapid response agency, Bush slashed funding.
If that wasn’t enough, Bush appointed Michael Brown, a man with no disaster experience, to head up the agency. Now the president is disingenuously claiming that Brown lied on his resume. Which begs the question, why wasn’t the administration during an extensive vetting period able to uncover a lie that the media discovered within hours?
And like 9/11, when Bush failed to respond to news that terrorists had flown into the World Trade Center, then disappeared for most of the day, when Katrina hit and in the day that followed, the president was conspicuously absent. Of course that’s not really true. He was on yet another five-week vacation, which he was loath to end early.
Federal agencies were no better. FEMA reacted slowly and remained ineffective and disorganized. The war in Iraq and the equally misguided policy of using National Guard troops as active duty combatants left the country with insufficient troops to manage this tragedy.
Had there been a strong military presence and a more timely response, it is possible that the levees might have shored up before they failed, many who died could have been saved and the pervasive violence and looting could have been prevented.
Of course, only the president could have stopped the worst of the looters, the disaster pirates known as the oil and gas industry. Instead, the president ignores soaring gas prices and continues to embrace policies that will only exacerbate global warming, which, in turn, will lead to more storms such as Katrina.
And despite Bush’s claims that he is a compassionate conservative, what Americans witnessed was an astounding lack of sensitivity. As thousands were held captive without food in the sewage-filled Astrodome or remained trapped in flooded homes, the president promised that Katrina would make them stronger. As bodies of the dead lay abandoned in the rising toxic sludge, the president congratulated FEMA director “Brownie” on a wonderful job. More misplaced was his heartfelt concern over the loss of millionaire Sen. Trent Lott’s mansion.
But the prize goes to the president’s mother. Barbara Bush, while visiting evacuees who had lost everything, remarked: “… many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” She went on to say that she was, “scared that all those left homeless would stay in Texas.”
But what is most repulsive is the pathological dishonesty on which the administration habitually relies to sell deceitful polices and to shift blame for their disastrous consequences.
For instance, the president claimed that he had no way of anticipating this disaster, when in fact FEMA had been warning for years that a hurricane hitting New Orleans was one of the three greatest potential catastrophes facing the country. Another lie was Bush’s excuse for not sending troops and aid sooner. Five days after the governor sent him a letter requesting federal aid and he promised to provide it, the president went on national television and said he was unable to provide federal help because Louisiana’s Democratic governor had failed to request that the president declare a national emergency.
But maybe the biggest joke of all is that the president wants to lead the investigation into what went wrong, when most of us already know the answer. We “elected” George Bush for a second term. (You can reach Ed Silverstein at)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 16, 2005. Read the original PDF.