Through the lens of New Orleans, America lost its super power

[struggle4progress]

By Michael Gawenda
March 6, 2006

Americans want to be liked rather than feared. So much for imperialism.

<snip> In New Orleans, where the city is broke and where some of the 1300 bodies of the Katrina dead are still to be identified and buried, where indeed, bodies are still being found in the debris of the destroyed poor and mainly black neighbourhoods, most people are concerned with the most basic issues of survival.

Like somewhere to live and somewhere to send their children to school and a hospital to go to if they need medical treatment. Like whether they will get a trailer in one of those tree-less, concrete-covered, wire-enclosed lots that the much-despised Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up and which, if they are lucky, will be home for the foreseeable future. Never mind that when the hurricane season starts in June, it is almost inevitable they will have to move out because the trailers could not withstand even an average storm. <snip>

What was not forgotten was that Bush and his Administration proved to be incapable of responding quickly and effectively to this admittedly unprecedented natural disaster and that after September 11, after the billions spent on setting up the new Department of Homeland Security, after all the planning for a major terrorist attack, the rescue efforts in New Orleans were a shambles. <snip>

The mistakes in Iraq and the failures in the aftermath of Katrina are connected in this sense: they have convinced a growing number of Americans that America has big problems of its own that need to be tackled — and that the Bush Administration seems incapable of handling — and that those ungrateful countries that get such generous American financial and military support are concerned, countries in which American generosity and sacrifice is repaid with virulent anti-Americanism, should be left to their own devices. <snip>

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/through-the-lens-of-new-orleans-america-lost-its-super-power/2006/03/05/1141493543879.html?page=2

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Also through the eyes of many Americans

Katrina is a subliminal (subliminable as Bush would say) issue.
Try and --- and check out the pictures.

Katrina destroyed Bush's aura of "War Time President Infallibility"

Even our idiot Gubernator - Boobengrabber Schwarzenegger -- is running away from Bush, Cheney, and Chertoff on Katrina (and our Sacramento Delta- San Joaquin DElta Levees)

[cliss]

2. That was a very good editorial

and it was spot-on. People have had it with George Bush.