From the top of the stack:
It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the destruction of New Orleans.Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt.
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His campaigns presented the arc of his life
story as that of a man who stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed a laserlike focus.
But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to question the president's arc.
He's stumbling in Iraq and he's stumbling on Katrina.Let's play the blame game:
the man who benefited more than anyone in history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those who lost their families. STRIKE ONE delivered by Maureen Dowd in
Haunted by HesitationSeptember 7, 2005
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07dowd.html?hp=&pagewanted=print And, from an unlikely member of the NYT Op-Ed bull....pen:
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up.
Well, it did happen on his watch.Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans,
Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked,
the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. An amazing slider from Thomas Friedman for STRIKE TWO in
Osama and Katrina on September 7, 2005
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print And, with Sulzberger probably off trying to find some other way to make Judith Miller stink less than the fetid waters of New Orleans, the NYT Editors deliver a 102 mph up-the-middle-you-can't-hit-this-no-matter-what, strike three.
With the size and difficulty of the task of rescuing and rebuilding New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas still unfolding,
it seemed early to talk about investigating how this predicted cataclysm had been allowed to occur and why the government's response was so slow and inept. Until yesterday, that is, when President Bush blithely announced at a photo-op cabinet meeting that he, personally, was going to "find out what went right and what went wrong."
We can't imagine a worse idea.
No administration could credibly investigate such an immense failure on its own watch. And we have learned through bitter experience - the Abu Ghraib nightmare is just one example -
that when this administration begins an internal investigation, it means a whitewash in which no one important is held accountable and no real change occurs.Mr. Bush signaled yesterday that we are in for more of the same when he sneered and said, "One of the things that people want us to do here is to play a blame game." This is not a game. It is critical to know what "things went wrong," as Mr. Bush put it.
But we also need to know which officials failed - not to humiliate them, but to replace them with competent people.<clip>
But disasters like this are not a city or a state issue. They concern the entire nation and demand a national response - certainly a better one than the White House comments that "tremendous progress" had been made in Louisiana.
We're used to that dismissive formula when questions are raised about Iraq. Americans deserve better about a disaster of this magnitude in their own country.From
It's Not a 'Blame Game' on September 7, 2005
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07wed1.html?hp=&pagewanted=printWhat I request is that DU advance from end of inning to END OF GAME.
Bush and Cheney must not just leave the field, they must never be allowed to return.
They must resign and face the legal consequences of their vast failings in a court of law.
Please support the following request in the DU Activist HQ:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=106x22688#22760Thank you.
Peace.
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