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How could they say George Bush allegedly somehow "didn't know" how bad New Orleans was until Thursday, fully three days after Katrina hit? They say *now* in a long Newsweek article that presidential aides are afraid to give Bush bad news, because he reacts so very poorly to it. Is this the main reason, or is it just excuse-making and spin from an administration that must have been the source of at least some of the info in the Newsweek article excerpts below, when these same administration officials are simultaneously faced with having to explain (among other things) Bush's embarrassing air guitar session of fiddling while flooded New Orleans "burned"?? (see the fourth Newsweek quote below) Newsweek: "How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a **national disgrace.**" (asterisks added) Newsweek: "When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority." Newsweek: "Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m. , she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got. Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military."
Newsweek: "To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business.""
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434 (Newsweek story)
The administration's delay in responding to Katrina almost necessarily led to calls for massive military intervention, even by most Democrats. It's as if progressives were suddenly through force of overwhelming human need backed into the unusual position of being the biggest fans of martial law and military action, even on our own soil. Newsweek amplifies the alleged Need for this. New Orleans eventually became a sea of automatic weapons, Marines apparently landed amphibiously on the Gulf Coast. Laws were suspended. Martial Law was instituted at least in Jefferson Parish.
Normally, speculating about the intent of political actors (or anyone else) is hazardous, for those defending the political actors will always have available scoffing, indignation, and puffing "conspiracy theorist" attacks.
But this hazard is not really present with this Bush administration, because they've specifically told us their intent via ideological emissaries. We have a distinct advantage on the question of intent regarding the institution of government because one of the ideological guides of this particular Administration (Grover Norquist) has specifically stated and famously admitted that his intent is to make government so "small and ineffectual" that he can "drown it in a bathtub".
Mr. Norquist: Is the "bathtub" in which all of the federal, state and local government is to be drowned (except perhaps the 82nd Airborne and the rest of the military) by any chance named Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana? This question seems to have occurred to various writers around the same time, including Thom Hartmann, myself and at least one other essay I saw contributed for publication to the New York Times.
If as Newsweek suggests we accept that Mr. Bush watches little or no TV beyond ESPN, we are nevertheless still told that his aides KNEW what was going on and were themselves watching TV. Given the knowledge within the ADMINISTRATION if not within the cerebral cortex of the President, how could THE ADMINISTRATION and its aides delay (knowing what we all knew) by many days in telling this news to their supposedly difficult boss?
Isn't it criminally negligent not to risk being momentarily chewed out by your boss if it means addressing the largest national emergency in our country's history, and saving many lives? Could Bush's ESPN viewing be interrupted with news of an attack on America? Perhaps not, since even My Pet Goat could not be interrupted for an attack on America at New York's twin towers.
But, if Bush can't be interrupted by his aides where thousands of lives are imminently at stake, then Mr. Bush should, for the safety and security of the country, be INSTANTLY removed from office and imprisoned indefinitely. He is plainly more of a threat to America than the shoe bomber ever DREAMED of being, for the shoe bomber at best threatened to bring down a single airliner with under 200 hundred people, while a combination of the Administration's hatred for government, personal pique and claimed petty fear of the same by his aides magnify the destruction of entire regions of our country.
Under recent administration precedent forcefully argued for in court by this same administration, we need not trouble ourselves with charges or trials, for we've got more than a reasonable fear that our nation's security is imperiled by Mr. Bush. Besides, impeachment is not nearly enough of a penalty, nor fast enough in result given the national security implications of this utter lack of what Newsweek termed "situational awareness".
Blunter folks call this situational awareness thing "Knowing what the hell one is doing."
Was there perhaps a level of acceptance among these aides of the chaos of destruction and a sense that the public would (even without Bush's leadership) rally as one, like they largely did after 9/11, and that the public would get beneficial propaganda messages via admiring Wal-Mart's ability to deliver some water as well as the military's larger ability to come in finally and appear to get some things moving?
Did it occur to these aides that perhaps the public would simultaneously have nothing but contempt and despair given the loss of life for all other "first responder" emergency functions of government, federal, state and local, with Democrats trashing the federal version and Republicans trashing the state and local version? Maybe these aides thought only the military would be left standing intact, and that was cool by them?
Hey, we don't know what's in people's hearts, except that this time Grover Norquist told us he wanted to kill the government. Let's not forget.
Helpfully, but not accurately, Rudy Giuliani was charitable in saying that he had the advantage of complete command of a huge police and fire apparatus even after the loss of so many in the twin towers, while New Orleans had no such infrastructure to be commanded.
The inaccuracy of Giuliani's statement in that New Orleans did have a police force, is not as operative as the overall contrast point: Giuliani as strong Republican leader in charge of very strong police forces results in a very different result than weak Democratic local officials in charge of a fleeing ragtag AWOL police corps.
Never mind that to compare apples and apples, and with Hurricane Katrina releasing the energy of 10-15 nuclear bombs, and the levee break making us realize New Orleans is at bottom a lake bed, Manhattan would have to be nuked (not just several buildings destroyed) and the police responders in Manhattan would need to arrive by small boat to meet a starving desperate population that somehow survived, and the President (a claimed hater of "technicalities") would have to be confused about whether he had technical "permission" to drop food and water on Manhattan or not, despite a clear declaration of emergency there by Giuliani and the overall obvious desperation of the entire situation and the general lack of any objection whatsoever likely to have any political force, regardless of the alleged statements of any one local politician or official alleged to have slowed things down.
Normally, a person would be in danger of being labeled a conspiracy theorist for even thinking about darker motives or what's behind things purposely kept as secret as the body counts in New Orleans, except that this time Grover Norquist and this administration have told us, up front, and in the clearest possible terms, what they intended to do to our government. They specifically intended, and have given us in advance the admission of this Intent. Without this admission, we would risk wallowing in a "blame game" of rank speculation about what was in the normally unknowable ideological mind of a particular Administration.
To accommodate this ideological bathtub-drowning goal that took many forms including the budget axe on flood control programs, people whose total numbers will never be truly known paid the ultimate price.
We shall now need a tomb for the Unknown Citizen.
With secrecy the watchword of the body counts, there's consequently no rational basis whatsoever for confidence in the results being reported, since no one can independently confirm them as a whole, or even in substantial part. In this respect, though it is uncomfortable to see bodies as mere "data", residents of Louisiana have become statistics to be used like Diebold and Sequoia count ballots: secretly, unverifiably, and with no basis for any confidence in the results they thereafter report. First secrecy denies us "one man, one vote", and now secrecy denies us the dignity of "one body, one statistic", at least in the sense that we have no basis to form a belief that an accurate count is truly occurring when secrecy is coveted so much.
Thus, an intentional act by the administration to cut and to downsize so that the government could be drowned in a bathtub had its murderous intentionality transferred to the citizens of the Gulf Coast through government policies of downsizing and cuts. Such angry intent is the basis for every criminal charge (which are intentional acts leading to death or serious bodily injury).
As to the administration's talking point defense of the "blame game", imagine, if you will, the trial of any criminal defendant in any courtroom in this country on charges of criminal negligence resulting in death, such as a drunk driving charge for example. Imagine the defendant's attorney suggesting in Court that the Court was no place for "blame games". When the matter is serious, talking about "blame games" is more than ridiculous. When the matter is serious, talking of "blame games" is utterly irresponsible and morally vacuous. Contemptible, you might say.
This is no game, for either the administration or the citizens of New Orleans. And blame is appropriate, as blame is the accountability mechanism for undeserved loss. So where is the administration's rhetoric of personal responsibility now? And since accountability for undeserved loss is a serious matter, why doesn't fairness and accuracy dictate that the Department of Homeland Security's web page on natural disasters (excerpted at bottom) saying that the Department of Homeland Security has **"primary responsibility"** for natural disasters plastered on the front page of every paper in the country as a retraction and counterpoint to those who "blame the local officials" and have their attacks uncritically printed by the media?
The American people are not so much stupid as they are *partisan*. Continuing to believe there are WMD in Iraq is much more a vote for the position of the administration's TEAM than it is a statement of ignorance about the news (though a few are surely just misinformed). We can understand "blame the local officials" rhetoric along with beliefs that WMD were found in Iraq as expressions of loyalty to one's team, or votes of loyalty, using fallacious arguments. In other words, poll questions are simply read and interpreted by most for the purpose of voting strategically to "support the team", and not to be factually accurate.
But now, things have stretched in this country well beyond the point where fallacious team cheer-leading will work anymore, and Republicans of good faith can and will abandon their President, and are starting to, in droves. We can never accept Bush as "our" President, the air guitar scene illustrating and admitting something no one could ever prove through mere written polemic such as this. Bush is now finished as a President for all but the most irrationally and unfairly loyal partisans, unless there are newly dramatic and profound developments very soon.
Brace yourself, then, for the administration's Intent to survive being caught with its pants down in the toxic overflowing bathtub that is Lake Pontchartrain. Attributing such possibly barbarous intent is hazardous and risky as always, but in admittedly intending to kill the government by drowning it in a bathtub, I think I am relatively safe in inferring that these ideological bathtub killers intended THEMSELVES to survive, and did not intend a murder/suicide. And so, I therefore wonder what the government-killers will try next.
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Website of the
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Emergencies and Disasters
"In the event of a terrorist attack, *natural disaster* or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume *primary responsibility* on March 1st <2004> for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort. http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/theme_home2.jsp
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