What has the Bush Administration been doing these last four years? If they weren’t busy preparing for a national emergency or busy catching Osama bin Laden – the perpetrator of the last great catastrophe in America – what on God’s green earth have they been up to?
This is incompetence that borders on indifference. Do they not care about people’s lives? How can you have a Department of Homeland Security that hasn’t prepared to defend the homeland?
What if it was a terrorist who blew up the levees of New Orleans instead of a hurricane? Would the response have been any different? If the answer is yes, then why? Why should it make any difference to the people whose lives were on the line what caused the levees to break? They should get help either way.
If the answer is “no, the response would have been the same,” then four years after 9/11, we are not even remotely prepared for a terrorist strike inside the United States.
What was FEMA doing all this time, preparing for an emergency that might hit Honduras or Iceland? New Orleans was the most vulnerable city in America for a natural disaster. Every expert in the field knew it. FEMA is not an association of dentists. Federal emergencies are their forte. It is one thing for a grocery store clerk or an accountant to say they couldn’t foresee a hurricane causing this big a problem in New Orleans, it’s another for FEMA to say the same thing. This is what we pay them for. Their claims of ignorance are pathetic and inexcusable.
Another excuse the Department of Homeland Security and the Bush administration were making is that they were having trouble responding because of the scale of this emergency. Well, we’ll just have to tell natural disasters or terrorists to keep their planned destruction to a minimum next time, so that the lightweights at DHS can handle it.
Or perhaps we can petition Mother Nature to pull her punches. It’s just not fair how tough she is on us. We’re just not ready for her big wallops. Next time, let’s just order heavy rain showers and see if FEMA can handle that. Besides, I thought President Bush was supposed to have some pull with the Big Guy upstairs. Couldn’t he have put in a good word for New Orleans?
I know the president has his hands full with his bike rides and naps and vacations, but does he oversee anything? Does he ever ask anyone working underneath him to be accountable? Does he have any idea what they’re doing and whether they’re doing it right? Does anyone have confidence that President Bush knows what FEMA’s plan of action is supposed to be in cases of emergency? Does anyone think President Bush knows the Pentagon’s plans for heeling the rift between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq? How about just knowing what the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite is?
You’re all shaking your heads right now because whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you know he doesn’t know any of these things. And that would be fine if he was a plumber or a professional brush-clearer. But he’s not – he is the President of the United States of America.
Has there ever been a man so overmatched for the job?
Is it normal to expect so little from the man who is The Leader of the Free World?
Hurricane Katrina touched down on land and the New Orleans levees were breached on Monday morning. On Tuesday, our fearless leader was still on vacation and still playing the fiddle … I’m sorry, the guitar.
People were still not being rescued on Friday. The mayor put out a “desperate S.O.S.” because he could not get help from the federal government. There was anarchy in the streets. We had lost another city to looters, death, mayhem and chaos. But this time it wasn’t Fallujah or Ramadi – it was New Orleans.
How bad at the job do you have to be before you get relieved of your command?
How about – so bad that you still can’t bring to justice the people who committed the greatest crime in American history after four long years? Our priorities are all wrong. We got Saddam Hussein who didn’t attack us, but we didn’t get Osama bin Laden who did. We got to Baghdad quicker than we got to New Orleans.
If the President cares to do something, he does it (usually with devastating incompetence, but he does it). If it doesn’t capture his attention, he’d rather go on a bike ride. So, there’s nothing left to conclude but that the people of New Orleans are just not that interesting to the President. And the victims of 9/11? He can’t be bothered to catch the man who ordered their cruel deaths, he’s got guitars to play and brush to clear.