Bush - The Man
With A Snafu Plan
By Sheila Samples
10 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
"A government
that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government
ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace,
that government is finished." ~Michael Rivero, What Really Happened
It's
a good thing President George Bush doesn't read newspapers or watch
TV. If he did, even he could see that people from one end of this nation
to the other are rapidly reaching zero tolerance with his bumbling ineptitude
each time he is faced with a crisis. Those who watched in amazement
as Bush sat paralyzed in a Florida elementary school on the morning
of September 11, 2001 as planes were ramming into the World Trade Center
and Pentagon -- who watched in dismay as he zigzagged across the country
from one hidey hole to another throughout the day -- were not surprised
that he dropped the ball when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast
on August 29.
Bush has dropped
every ball thrown to him throughout his life. But he's a hell of a cheerleader.
It's almost like being back in college. In an instant, Bush can whip
a crowd into a frenzy, armed with nothing but a bullhorn and a shell-shocked
firefighter. He can divert the attention of an entire nation from what
is happening on the field by locking it into one massive, cheering "wave."
Life is a game. Go Team.
However, Operation
Hurricane Katrina is vastly different from Bush's "freedom is on
the march" game that continues to wreak chaos, death and destruction
throughout the Arab world. In the aftermath of Katrina, the homeless,
bewildered, abandoned and starving citizens may be poverty-striken,
they may be dark-skinned, but they are Americans. And, because they
are Americans, the cheering has stopped. The media, led by the shaking
outrage of CNN's Anderson Cooper and right-leaning curmudgeon Jack Cafferty,
followed by the networks and, finally, by the wonderous on-air meltdown
of Fox News' Shepard Smith, at long last is doing its job. For a time,
however fleeting, the media has been shocked into telling the truth,
asking the right questions and holding the administration's feet to
the fire.
Thanks to the media,
Bush is out there without a bullhorn -- and without a game plan.
The best-laid plans
Of course the neoconservatives
who are in control of this country had a plan for Iraq. I've written
about it so often I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up again. In 1992,
Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz laid out their obsesson
for world dominance in a secret document, Defense Planning Guidance
wherein they boldly asserted, "our overall objective is to remain
the predominant outside power in the region (Middle East and SW Asia)
and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."
Although such arrogance
caused a furor when released to the media, the war jackals merely retreated
into their lair and continued to hone the policy of preemptive war to
seize control of the world's resources. That was the plan then, it was
the plan in 1997 when they established the warmongering think-tank,
Project for a New American Century, it was the plan outlined in the
September 2000 Rebuilding America's Defenses, which included another
bold assertion -- to achieve their goal they would need "a catastrophic
and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor" -- and it remains
the plan today.
It was a stroke
of genius in 2000 to rig the election and put George Bush in the Cheerleader
in Chief role. Bush is mean-spirited, vindictive, greedy, incapable
of feeling empathy, easily manipulated, desperate for attention -- even
adulation -- and has no qualms with playing the God card for political
gain. Americans are a forgiving people, and most accepted without question
this worthless, former booze-and-drug sodden ne'er-do-well's claim that
he was born again -- a man of God. They loved him. All Cheney had to
do was select himself as Number Two, slip behind the curtain, and the
cabal -- as they like to call themselves -- was open for business, and
waiting for a new Pearl Harbor.
It was not long
in coming. If 9-11 taught us nothing else, we must ultimately concede
that George Bush entered office on his way to war with Iraq, and had
no qualms about lying repeatedly to the American people and to our allies
to get there. Piles of dead bodies, including nearly 2,100 coalition
soldiers and marines and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the majority of
whom are women and children, are but a minor irritant to Bush. That
part of humanity not belonging to the corporate world is invisible to
Bush, nothing more than collateral damage, and is not factored into
his "war plan."
Long before the
devastation of Hurricane Katrina, just as before 9-11, administration
officials were warned of impending peril. Although they played out the
frightening scenario in rehearsal after rehearsal, when it was "show
time" they were nowhere to be found. They knew. And they did nothing.
Either by incompetence or design, they failed to act, and the death,
crippling despair, disease and sheer hopelessness suffered by Americans
in our most romantic city is breathtaking in scope and indefensible
on any level.
Bush has repeatedly
slashed funds for the Army Corps of Engineers water projects for New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast. In 2003, the money that had previously flowed
into the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), tasked
with shoring up levees and building pumping stations, dried up to a
mere trickle. With warnings ringing in his ears, in 2004 Bush refused
the money requested to raise the levees and rejected a plea for a $15-million
project to shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. And, in June, Bush's
2006 federal budget called for slashing SELA funds from an already inadequate
$36.5-million to a mere $10.4-million, and for cutting the overall New
Orleans Corps of Engineers budget a record $71.2-million, which Corps
officials say is the largest single-year funding loss ever.
But all is not lost.
The Corps of Engineers managed to get a hefty $100-million for just
one water project -- in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. According
to the peerless Ward Harkavy, who writes The Morning Report for the
Village Voice, "On August 15, just two weeks before Katrina slammed
into the U.S., the Pentagon boasted of spending $6.4-billion -- so far
-- on 2,705 Corps of Engineers construction projects in Iraq, all but
200 of them started since June 2004."
The SNAFU plan
It looks to me like
everything is going according to plan. Chaos, like everything else,
is just a matter of perspective. Few people really know anything about
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), except it's a name that's
thrown around a lot during times of national disaster. Do not think
for one minute that Bush "gutted" FEMA by placing it under
the control of Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff. By any other
name, FEMA remains this nation's "secret government," with
powers to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens
without a warrant, hold citizens without a trial, seize control of all
transportation and communication systems and -- suspend the US Constitution.
FEMA was created
outside of Constitutional law via a President John Kennedy Executive
Order, and is subject to no Congressional oversight. It received a "tune
up" under President Jimmy Carter then, like Topsy, "just growed"
through presidents Nixon, Reagan, Poppy and Bubba to the present time.
Genocide fascists like Henry Kissinger, and greedy patriots like former
General Richard Secord and Lt. Col. Oliver North, the architects of
both the Iran-Contra scandal and today's FEMA, must be laughing their
asses off at the juvenile disinformation bait-and-switch scenario playing
itself out in the US media.
We would do well
to remember that these jackals are on a mission. No matter how many
times they are exposed as liars and deceivers, they continue across
the field of life like a hoard of grasshoppers, leaving stripped and
broken humanity in their wake. They are roiling the waters of the Mississippi
by portraying FEMA as dim-witted, absent-minded, rudderless.
And it's working.
The media, Internet, Congress, you, me -- everybody -- all baying for
Bush to dump the hapless FEMA director, Michael Brown, a Bush crony
and former counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association.
We are all outraged, not at Bush for dropping the ball; for being so
chillingly disconnected from those he is charged to protect -- but at
Brown, who is a perfect lightning rod and, if need be, a fall guy.
He's also a man
with a plan.
Take a look at these
headlines -- FEMA refusing all offered rescue assistance from Amtrack
to experienced firefighters, FEMA not delivering on promises, FEMA barring
delivery of desperately needed food or water to frightened and bewildered
victims of Katrina, FEMA telling First Responders not to "respond"
to the disaster. Does anybody but me see a pattern here? Is it possible
for an emergency aid organization to show up at the scene only to refuse
all offers of aid? Does McDonald's cook up a bunch of hamburgers and
then lock its doors to its hungry patrons?
FEMA is the Patriot
Act on crack. Once its powers are unleashed, Oliver North's REX 84 "exercise"
will become a reality. The Constitution will be suspended and FEMA will
have the right to detain or seize the property of anyone even suspected
of engaging in, or who might be thinking of conspiring with others to
engage in acts of espionage or sabotage. REX 84 also advocated rounding
up and transferring to "assembly centers or relocation camps"
of at least 21 million American Negroes in the event of massive rioting
or disorder, not unlike the rounding up of the Jews in Nazi Germany
in the 1930s.
The actual number
of displaced New Orleans residents is unknown. Overnight, they became
"refugees," and hundreds of thousands packed into the Super
Dome or sat sweltering in the sun on roads and bridges during a nightmarish
week of waiting for help that did not come, while political fat cats
finger-pointed and accused each other of playing the "blame"
game. Finally, their military liberators herded them onto buses and
planes, refusing to reveal their destination -- husbands and wives separated,
families split apart -- and disappeared to "assembly centers or
location camps" throughout the United States.
Bush, who once asked
Sojourners' Reverend Jim Wallis how to talk to poor people because he
had never been around one, has once again dropped the ball. Telling
Americans whose homes, jobs, loved ones, whose whole lives were washed
away in a single night to "hang in there, and don't buy gasoline
if you can't afford it," before cutting out to a birthday party
in Arizona falls a bit short of his presidential promise to "protect
the American people."
It's unfortunate
that it took a tragedy like Katrina for middle- and lower-class America
to finally come to grips with where they will fit into the capitalist
White supremacist New World Disorder. Americans now know that Bush is
incapable of leading. They know he's too arrogant and stubborn to follow.
They know it's time for him to get out of the way -- before more of
us are trampled, displaced, abandoned, and destroyed, not only here
but throughout the world.
Sheila Samples is
an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information
Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.
Contact her at: [email protected].
© 2005 Sheila
Samples