(no subject)
It has now been one week since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. Since then, we have seen one of our great American cities virtually destroyed; the rich history and tradition of the French Quarter, the world-renowned Mardi Gras festival, the famous Southern cuisine, now mostly buried under a great lake choked with debris and bodies. “An act of God,” as it will be referred to by the administration and on billions of dollars’ worth of insurance claims. But we all know what happened. We know the real damage, the leveling of New Orleans, was done not by the pass of the hurricane, but by the breeching of the levees. We know that people have died while waiting for help to arrive, while tardiness and ill-readiness triumphed over the immediacy this situation required. And we know why. When Michael Moore, CNN, and Geraldo Rivera at FOX News are asking the same questions, I’d say we all know why.
I believe it is time for us to impeach our arrogant, incompetent president. At his best he is like a developmentally disabled child who is coasting down the hill in his father's car, having released the emergency brake; at his worst, he is one of the world's most effective terrorists, with the means and the motives to kill thousands of people around the world, and whether it's through the supreme negligence of New Orleans or outright murder in Iraq matters little to the dead. There are three worst-case scenarios that the government considers deserving of the utmost vigilance in this country, and they are (a) a terrorist attack on New York City, (b) an earthquake that levels San Francisco, and (c) a hurricane swamping and destroying New Orleans. Two of these three have now occurred on Bush's watch, and he's got another three years to go.
The neocons vilified John Kerry for having considered the possibility that spending hundreds of billions of dollars to kill a hundred thousand poor people in Iraq might not be a worthy cause, and told us the myriad ways in which he would fail to protect us. They tried to cast aspersions retroactively on Bill Clinton, saying that he could not properly focus on terrorism because he was too involved with the sex-scandal proceedings they fought so vehemently to hold. And yet, who spent 42% of his days in office before September 11 on vacation, choosing to clean up brush and watch the dog hunt armadillos instead of reading reports indicating Osama bin Laden intended to attack the country by hijacking a plane? Who was asleep at the switch, sitting in a puddle of his own piss in a classroom in Florida while people in New York were incinerated or forced to jump a thousand feet to their deaths? Who purposely cut the Army Corps of Engineers' funds for New Orleans three years running despite repeated requests for more money to reinforce levees that would not withstand a major hurricane? Who is unable to get relief to the people of Louisiana because he has dispatched too much of the Coast Guard and their high-water vehicles halfway around the world for a round of toy soldiers?
There is, quite simply, zero accountability in this administration. Sure, once in a while they’ll throw someone to the wolves, like they did with now-homeless Trent Lott after he publicly stated his wistfulness for Strom Thurmond’s lost segregated America. (After all, it’s one thing to leave black people dying on their rooftops, and quite another thing to openly admit your racism.) But when it comes to taking credit for real mistakes, for lives lost and cities destroyed, Bush seems incapable of owning up.
When a young woman asked the president, during the 2004 debates, if he could name even a single mistake he had made, he stumbled, spoke equivocally, and ultimately dodged the question. The man started a modern-day Vietnam, sending thousands of inadequately armored young men and women to an early grave, was unable to find the fabricated weapons of mass destruction, was unable to bring any sort of peace to the country after deposing the dictatorship, and yet he couldn't think of a mistake. The world got to see pictures of proud women smiling and giving the thumbs-up over hooded, naked, humiliated and tortured Iraqis, and the country’s occupation has created an electricity shortage, a gas shortage, and widespread water pollution, but he just couldn’t think of one.
Perhaps he can think of one now? No, it doesn't seem so. He told the American public last week, with a straight face, that no one anticipated the levees breaking. No one, of course, except local and state officials, FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers. The cost to reinforce those levees to the point where they would have withstood the hurricane, by the way, is equal to the amount of money the US spends on Iraq in TWO DAYS. It just couldn’t be found, I guess.
But who made mistakes? It certainly couldn't have been a mistake to go on to a fundraiser in San Diego the day after the hurricane, could it? Or to finally deign to show up in Louisiana on Thursday, stay for the day and then leave, saying "don't worry, I may be leaving, but I won't forget about this?" (How could he be expected to arrive earlier or stay longer? This is his vacation, people! Cheney didn't come back from his, after all!)
Of course, we're told it's not the time to assign blame. Michael Chertoff, our current head of Homeland Security, had this to say when asked in a press conference on Saturday why the response time wasn't quicker: "That's the kind of question that, if we were in court, the judge would say 'objection sustained,' and throw the question out as being 'too argumentative'". Heaven forfend! How dare we ask argumentative questions at a time when alligators are eating the corpses of our citizens! Five whole days passed before real aid began to reach these people, long after many had drowned in their attics, but I wouldn't want to rock the boat! I don't know exactly where all of that Homeland Security money went that was supposed to greatly speed up our response to disasters, but thank God I have a color-coded terror alert system, so I'll at least know each day whether my T-shirt is going to clash.
However, some people are only too happy to assign blame, but to divert it from the president. I've heard the argument that New Orleans elected to build a Superdome with their money when they should have spent it on their levees -- except the Superdome was constructed in 1975, when the levees were believed to be sufficient, and it was not manifest until 1995 that money needed to be put towards their reconstruction. I've heard the argument that living next to a levee is asking for trouble, as if the poverty-stricken citizens there had a choice of where they could afford to live. I've heard the argument that people should have evacuated early, as if telling the poor and elderly to find the money and transportation to leave their homes is aid enough. I suppose while we're at it, we should point fingers at the 18th century settlers who decided to found a town there. But it seems like a stretch to ask these questions while avoiding the big white elephant in the corner of the room.
I have watched George Bush survive not one but two questionable elections; I have watched him struggle to comprehend a terrorist attack and then simply refuse to comprehend its implications; I have watched him wage war with hunches and guesses; I have watched him gamble with Social Security, with healthcare, with education, with the environment, and most certainly with our economy; and now I have watched him regard the greatest natural disaster in a century and its subsequent destruction with all the interest of a high-schooler who hopes to put off his summer reading as long as possible. It is time for his career as a public figure to end; let him spend his days on the ranch at Crawford, away from inconvenient protesters asking pesky questions about their dead children; let him spend his days at the estate in Kennebunkport, at his second home far away from the people who’ve lost their first and only homes; but the country, in my opinion, can not weather another three years of his leadership. Otherwise we are no better than the buffalo that runs by instinct off the cliff, than the lemming that follows its leader to its doom, than the mice who drowned with thousands of people and a once-great city.