- If he is alive, Osama bin Laden surely is enjoying some
hearty laughter. Nothing he could imagine, short of the virtually-impossible
task of obtaining a tactical nuclear weapon and detonating it in an American
city, compares to the damage just inflicted upon the United States by its
own President. Ten thousand dead is the estimate of New Orleans' mayor.
A morticians' emergency measures organization is ready for forty thousand
corpses. We won't know for weeks, maybe months, as attics, basements, sewers,
canals, and dumpsters are searched. The economic damage is nothing less
than colossal.
-
- Columnist Paul Krugman repeated Monday, September 5,
a Chicago Tribune report that the U.S.S. Bataan, a military ship with six
operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds, and the machinery to produce
100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, sat off the Gulf Coast since Monday
(August 29, when Katrina struck) without any patients.
-
- On September 2, Krugman repeated the following from an
editorial in Biloxi, Mississippi's Sun Herald: "On Wednesday, reporters
listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior
High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force
personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball
and performing calisthenics!"
-
- Germany only just before these events experienced horrible
floods, but that country's government acted decisively and promptly to
limit human suffering and damage. Britain, despite my reservations about
some measures taken, acted with remarkable speed after the London Underground
bombings. One of the world's great cities in crisis was quickly managed,
with emergency organizations and police immediately deployed.
-
- The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, bravely rode the
Underground the next day to reassure citizens. By comparison, the Mayor
of New Orleans and the President of Jefferson Parish were reduced to screams
and tears on television by the lack of response from Washington.
-
- When Bush got around to visiting - incidentally, holding
up the urgent delivery of food supplies by planes grounded for his security
- what we got were photo-ops like the staged start to repairing a damaged
levee. In safely-selected meetings with a few area residents, Bush, suddenly
appeared in a checkered shirt instead of his usual silk suit with overly-padded
shoulders. He exchanged such fascinating anecdotes as the fact that Trent
Lott had also lost a home (one of several) and that he, Bush, looked forward
to sitting with Trent on the porch of his new, better house.
-
- How would Trent's new house be a better one, I wondered
reading these words? Because Trent would have no trouble more than replacing
his loss through manipulating the bounty of one Federal program or another?
Because Trent had already got the President's ear on his personal misfortune?
Few of the desperate people clinging to roofs or the relatives of others
floating face-down in filthy tides while Bush spoke could anticipate such
bounty.
-
- No one in the press, so far as I am aware, seems to have
caught the fact that Bush, in his pathetic effort to say something comforting,
referred to a man who was pushed from his high position in the Senate because
of a history of associations and words that can only be called Klan-friendly.
Compassionate Bush was offering this anecdote in a place where most of
the dead and truly hopeless are poor blacks. Also unnoticed by the press
was just how Bush would be aware of so insignificant a matter as Trent's
loss when the desperate Mayor of New Orleans couldn't reach him on the
phone.
-
- Brains and character do count in leadership, and it has
long been obvious to much of the world that George Bush possesses neither.
Why did you re-elect this wretched man, America? There is almost nothing
ghastly enough to say about his performance in a catastrophe. It is a virtual
repeat of what he did to Iraq, but you really don't seem to care about
the horrors he has inflicted abroad. Perhaps, now, finally, you will care.
-
- I do not believe, as some do, that George Bush is a racist.
George Bush doesn't have enough common human feeling to be a racist. He
is a dull, droning, unfeeling man who has always enjoyed immense privileges
while avoiding all responsibility and genuine work.
-
- I do not believe, although the metaphor is tempting,
that George Bush is Nero, for Nero, despite utter corruptness, actually
had some intelligence. The appropriate Roman metaphor for Bush is the horse,
Incitatus, which the ghoulish monster Caligula kept in the Imperial Palace
and was reported to have appointed a Roman Consul. In this analogy, Caligula
represents America's insatiably-greedy Right Wing who put Bush where he
is.
-
- What so many Americans still do not appreciate is that
Bush's criminally negligent behavior concerning a hurricane in New Orleans
closely parallels his and other Republican behavior before 9/11. Such simple,
relatively inexpensive measures as secure cockpit doors and improved standards
of security at airports would have made 9/11 impossible (just as improved
levees and proper evacuation plans would have made the losses of New Orleans
impossible). These were sensible measures being advocated then, not just
in view of potential terrorism, but owing to the then considerable threat
of hijacking, and they would have cost a tiny fraction of war in Afghanistan
(I don't include the cost of the bloody horror in Iraq since it has literally
nothing to do with terror).
-
- So, too, the total failure of the CIA under George Tenet
to anticipate what was happening with some of its own human assets from
the Middle East, while Israeli agents, arrested in the United States and
expelled afterwards, seem to have been totally on to Atta and the boys.
Reportedly, Tenet has written a twenty-page response he intends to publish
if the draft of the report on CIA negligence is published in its existing
form. Tenet's piece apparently implicates Bush and his people in the failure.
-
- If we must stick to comparisons with historical people
rather than the horse of a Roman Emperor, Bush resembles the ne'er-do-well
son of one of those putridly corrupt dukes in France's Ancien Regime who
would kill a servant in a fit of rage or ride over a peasant in his path.
Such a person, in the rare event his deed was brought to the king's attention,
also pretended some vague, unaccountable mistake had been made and routinely
was let go.
-
- My God, look at the words of this man's mother, a woman
everyone who knows the family says closely resembles him both in intelligence
and attitudes. Barbara just may have surpassed Marie Antoinette's fabled
(Marie never said it), "Let them eat cake!" Here is a quote from
Mother Barbara on a tour of the Astrodome relief center:
-
- "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they
all want to stay in Texas.
-
- Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
-
- "And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged
-
- anyway, so this--this (chuckling slightly) is working
very well for them."
-
- Although her earlier comment on deaths in Iraq, made
on national television, would be hard to beat for words devoid of human
feeling:
-
- "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?
It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something
like that?"
-
- The apple does not fall far from the tree.
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