The world press weighs in on Katrina and its aftermath

[RamboLiberal]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/09/07/worldviews.DTL


Don't think the rest of the world -- not just stunned Americans and even some conservative American reporters and commentators who have long served as George W. Bush's loyal mouthpieces -- failed to notice the president's inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation. What foreign observers witnessed from afar, with a combination of shock and awe: "sheer, maddening incompetence, from both the (notoriously corrupt) state authorities and from Washington." (Daily Mail)

In Italy, Corriere della Sera scolded the "world's greatest country," calling the United States "a land that can no longer get it together to work together."

"Superpower or Third World?" a headline in the Spanish daily Noticias de Álava declared, in response to Bush and his highest-level emergency-relief officials' inefficiency and seeming indifference to the plight of the tens of thousands who were left homeless or injured by Katrina.

"The scenes are reminiscent of a drought-stricken African state where starving refugees piteously cry for help," the British tabloid the Daily Mail stated, "yet this is a great city in the richest and most powerful nation on earth" in which "odies lie where they drop ... marauding, armed gangs loot, rape and kill ... relief workers are shot at people die for want of drinking water."

[tocqueville]

1. I just saw an amazing French TV report in Houston where :

1) officials said that everything was under control

2) interviewed nurses at the Astrodome said that they lacked of EVERYTHING and ACCUSED the US MSM of NOT REPORTING THE TRUTH, specially on TV : "there are people dying here, people who have lost everything"... "We pay medecine out of our own pockets"...

[txaslftist]

2. One thing I hate Bush for. He's made the US look so shitty ...

...for all these years he's been in office.

Hey, rest of the world, we're not all like him!

[bemildred]

3. Dragged us down to his level, he did. nt