To Those Who
Voted for Bush:
Do You Get It Now?
By Bernard Weiner
11 September, 2005
The Crisis
Papers
Here's
something I don't understand. The Golden Goose was about to lay another
9/11-type Golden Egg for Bush&Co. to pick up. And they didn't.
Surely, Karl Rove,
who had seen Bush's approval ratings drop to all-time lows, knew days
ahead that a Category 5 Hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans and
a calamitous disaster was likely to unfold there if and when the levees
were unable to hold back the water. What better way to improve those
ratings than for Bush to be photographed the day after the disaster
struck, standing on top of debris, bullhorn in hand, vowing that the
government would help Gulf Coast states rebuild from the Katrina catastrophe?
But none of that
happened. They bungled their own political resurrection! Nearly a full
week went by, while thousands were dying and starving or were kenneled
in unbelievable filth in New Orleans. Nobody seemed to be in charge.
Bush remained "on vacation" in Crawford, and traveled around
to fundraisers, played golf, etc.; Condi was theatergoing and buying
thousand-dollar shoes on Fifth Avenue. What was going on? Did Karl Rove
not understand the significance of what was happening? Was Bush...uh..."incapacitated"?
What about Cheney, "on vacation" in Wyoming; was he "incapacitated,"
too? Are the Bush people really that politically obtuse?
So here's the question
I have for those of you who voted for Bush in 2004: Do you get it now?
BUSH GOES AWOL, AGAIN
For the past four
years, progressives and moderate-conservatives have been pointing out
how incompetent this Administration is. Many Bush Republicans accused
us of making up such accusations for purely political reasons. Now you
yourself can see what we have seen: These guys are way over their heads
and haven't got a clue; they're constantly having to come back at a
problem in hopes of getting it right the second or third time around.
Of course, that means they're always playing catch-up, which means they're
always too late. (Such as this Alice-in-Wonderland comment by Bush a
week after he went AWOL -- again -- when his country needed him: "In
America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.")
Those at the royal
Bush court lead such isolated, circumscribed lives that when a disaster
strikes, they are so far removed from the circumstances in which regular
people find themselves that they simply don't understand the magnitude
of what's happening out there in the real-world. You may remember that
Bush's first response to the Asian tsunami was silence, and then a grudging
piddling amount of aid offered; it took the international community
shaming him for his unfeeling miserliness before his handlers began
to change Bush's tune and he finally pledged genuine aid commensurate
with the enormity of the catastrophe.
Our earlier assessment
of the Administration as bumblers was made mainly on the disaster that
Bush&Co. made, and are still making, in the Persian Gulf. But now
the whole world gets to see, up close and personal, the thorough botch
they made, and are still making, in the other Gulf, in New Orleans and
environs.
THE IRAQ BOTCH
In Iraq, they launched
a war based on lies and deceptions, and had no plan for what should
happen after the major military fighting ceased.
They turned away
Iraqis from participating in the reconstruction of their own society,
preferring to award the multi-billion-dollar contracts to huge American
firms like Halliburton and Bechtel. They disbanded the Iraqi army, leaving
hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men unemployed and angry. They
insultingly refused aid and advice from the United Nations and their
former allies, wanting nobody to interfere with their Occupation. They
didn't have enough troops, and the correct troops, in place to police
the "post-war" phase. They didn't guard the abandoned ammo
dumps, and then were surprised when those munitions were used to blow
up U.S. soldiers.
They finally, a
year or two late, realized that the U.S. was engaged in a guerrilla-style
war against nationalist insurgents, along with some foreign jihadists,
and started to change their military strategy. But it was too late,
and insufficient, to make much of a dent. Now the U.S. is involved in
a stalemated, Vietnam-like quagmire, and steady streams of flag-draped
caskets make their way back to the U.S., and thousands and thousands
of innocent Iraqi civilians continue dying as well.
And still Bush cannot
bring himself to answer Cindy Sheehan's simple question: "For what
noble cause did my son have to die?"
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL
Now in 2005, a natural
disaster occurred that everyone predicted -- including the government's
own emergency-response specialists. Specifically, Homeland Security
Department chief Michael Chertoff and FEMA's head Michael Brown were
briefed on the consequences of the levees breaking days before Hurricane
Katrina hit New Orleans. But the Administration's response was non-existent.
Or completely beyond belief: Bush actually told Diane Sawyer "I
don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Read
your experts' frickin reports, man!
FEMA (the Federal
Emergency Management Agency -- which Bush turned into a stripped-down,
underfunded subgroup buried in the Homeland Security Department, focusing
on anti-terrorism measures rather than on emergency-management -- is
led by an bumbling political appointee, Brown, someone with no experience
in this field, and it showed; for example, neither he nor Chertoff were
aware there were thousands of refugees in the city's Convention Center
until Day 5. We ordinary citizens, paying attention to the news reports,
knew that three days before they did.
Brown was a buddy of one of Bush's Texas pals, with a history in show-horses.
That's the man in charge of FEMA. And, believe it or not, Bush the other
day thanked him publicly for doing such a "heck of a job."
Oh, by the way, guess which company has been awarded the contract for
reconstructing New Orleans? Yep, Cheney's Halliburton.
New Orleans mayor
Ray Nagin hit the nail on the head about Bush's belated promise to send
40,000 troops into his city. "Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming
here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses
and do something."
Tens of thousands
of New Orleans residents -- those mostly too poor to have been able
to evacuate the city -- were herded into mass structures like the Superdome
and Convention Center, locked inside, and then no government agency
provided food, water, medicine, sanitation care, removal of the dead,
etc. Those who wanted to leave those horrific shelters and cross over
a bridge to dry land were prohibited by armed troops from doing so.
Many of those residents
complained that the thousands of citizens there were treated worse than
dogs in a kennel. It was a circle out of Dante's Inferno. Indeed, so
atrociously were the victims treated in those facilities that even right-wing
Fox News reporters Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera were appalled on
the air, just trying to get viewers to understand the enormity of the
hell-on-earth scenes they were witnessing. Rivera was crying and screaming
to "let these people walk out of here...just let them leave."
(You've got to see this
powerful video of Shepard and Rivera live on air -- reality-TV
at its best.)
DON'T BE POOR OR POOR-AND-BLACK
The fact that the
great majority of those seeking refuge and rescue were African-American,
and that no help came in the first five or six days, spoke volumes about
the "compassionate conservatism" supposedly animating Bush's
administration. Try to imagine how fast the federal government would
have mobilized to reach an upper-class compound filled with thousands
of well-do-do white people, with access and influence. You get the picture.
Speaking of pictures,
two comments:
1. Bush flew into
New Orleans to have his picture taken for public-relations purposes.
At one location, he spoke at a "food-distribution" point,
which disappeared shortly after the photo-op. It was a set! Various
other photo ops likewise were organized that were equally as unreal.
For more, see "The
Potemkin Photo Op".
2. No doubt you've
seen the way two virtually identical photos of hurricane survivors were
captioned in local newspapers. In one, a white man, up to his chest
in water, with some groceries in his hands: "...found food at a
local market." In another, same scenario, but a young black man:
"...looted food from a supermarket." Both were trying to survive
and bring some form of sustenance back to their children and families.
One "found" food, the other "looted" food.
Interestingly, when
after Baghdad fell, we saw the video pictures of Iraqis looting stores
and museums and such, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said: "Freedom's
untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes
and do bad things". . . Looting, he added, was not uncommon for
countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens."
Now the governor of Louisiana is talking about "shoot-to-kill"
orders against those who, facing starvation from a non-caring government,
are taking food from abandoned, flooded-out grocery stores. And right-wing,
let-them-eat-cake pundits blame the mostly black, poverty-stricken residents
for "choosing" not to evacuate New Orleans, as if these cashless
folks should just have jumped in their non-existent cars or boats and
headed out of town. Of course, FEMA or the military could have supplied
the buses and trucks and trains to take out the trapped, but apparently
there were no such contingency plans and/or nobody with any brains was
in charge to get the mass evacuation organized.
A REVERSE-MIDAS TOUCH
But let's move on
from America's perennial, always-just-below-the-surface racism and hits-on-the-poor.
The point here is that George W. Bush has a reverse Midas touch. Whatever
he involves himself in as a leader winds up in FUBAR land. (If you don't
know what those letters stand for, ask someone in the military: ----
Up Beyond All Recognition.)
It happened with
his botched oil-company ventures at Arbusto and Harken Energy in Texas;
it happened, and is happening in Iraq; and now it's happening with regard
to the Katrina disaster in Louisiana.
Except this time
there's no wealthy family friend, or Saudi prince, or British prime
minister, to bail Bush out of his difficulties. He's out there all by
his lonesome, exposed for all the world to see as the emperor with no
clothes, a figurehead leader with no emotional or intellectual wherewithal
to deal efficiently and correctly with anything beyond the most simple
scenarios. Introduce complexity into the equation, and he's a deer in
the highlights of reality.
So...what to do?
While Rove&Co. ratchet up the ol' spin machine -- and try to find
others to blame for their own gross delays and mistakes -- Bush's normal
allies are abandoning him, right and left and right. Business Week,
Washington Times, newspapers around the country, conservative pundits
David Brooks and Newt Gingrich, retired military officers, and so on
-- they all can't believe the idiocy and deadly cluelessness of their
GOP hero.
They all realize
that this incompetent, way-over-his-head guy has three more years on
his contract, and he's likely to take down the economy, political structure,
and everything else with him as his administration self-destructs in
an unholy mess. In short, the Bush Administration is not good for business,
which CEOs and others are finally starting to realize.
LEAVE OR BE PUSHED
Bush and Cheney
and Rumsfeld and Rice and Chertoff and the others simply have got to
go, along with the other fools and criminals down there in his bunker.
Bush and Cheney either must be encouraged by GOP powerbrokers to resign,
or they must be impeached.
They each took a
solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution and all American
citizens. They have shredded the Constitution -- in the name of "anti-terrorism,"
they have denuded the Bill of Rights -- and they have clearly demonstrated
that they are incapable of protecting the citizenry, either in Iraq
or here at home. Clear dereliction of duty.
Indeed, they have,
for their own partisan purposes, revealed the identity of a covert CIA
agent -- a crime that according to President George H. W. Bush is "traitorous";
indictments are expected shortly against key Bush Administration officials
involved in this case. In addition, the Administration has "disappeared"
American citizens into the military gulag, away from contact with lawyers
or their families. This is the behavior of dictators; when it happens
in African or Latin American countries, we are outraged. Folks, it's
happening right here.
You and I, no matter
for whom we voted in 2004, need to stop these incompetent fools from
doing even more damage, and get this country back on its moral track,
run by leaders who have something else on their minds other than power-hunger
and take-the-money-and-run.
Bush and Cheney
should resign voluntarily right now, in the best interests of the country.
If they don't choose to go, it's long past time for impeachment hearings
to begin and for local prosecutors and grand juries (perhaps in New
Orleans parishes) to start their own investigations and indictments,
and not depend solely on Congress for accountability-reckoning. That's
the message that needs to go out from all of us, Democrats and Republicans,
to our legislators.
I can't express
it any better than Aaron Broussard, the president of New Orleans' Jefferson
Parish. Here is what he had to say on Meet the Press.
"We have been
abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go
down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast.
But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst
abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. ? Whoever
is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed
off and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina
that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed
murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand
trial before Congress now."
Now!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bernard Weiner
has authored more than 150 articles and essays about the Bush Administration
since 9/11/01. A Ph.D. in government & international relations,
he has taught at various colleges, was a writer/editor with the San
Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits The Crisis
Papers ( www.crisispapers.org ) .