"After 9/11 and Katrina, reality intruded on the president" -Guardian

[mr blur]

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With Osama bin Laden still at large and much of New Orleans still looking like a bomb site, Bush twice failed to seize the moment to accomplish the immediate task at hand or comfort a traumatised nation. But both times he and his party moved quickly to exploit the chaos to advance their own agenda.

As early as November 21 2001 Bush asked Donald Rumsfeld: "What kind of war plan do you have for Iraq?" The president continues to link Iraq to the war on terror - he did so in his radio address two days ago - even though a majority of Americans now reject such a link.

Less than two weeks after Katrina, the Republican congressman Richard Baker reportedly said: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

The causes and the solutions for these two tragedies couldn't be more different. But they raise the same two central questions: how can America use its superpower status, at home and abroad, to make the world a safer, better place for ordinary working people; and what form of collective intuitive malaise convinced a majority of Americans - albeit a slender one - to check their guts and then choose this man?
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1864123,00.html