Once again Bush’s claims in response to a national tragedy ring hollow. As Bush explained to Diane Sawyer, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees.”* Nobody, that is, except the scientists and engineers who’d been warning about just this kind of catastrophe for decades. Even so the Bush administration allocated a mere $40 million for hurricane and flood programs centered around New Orleans, cutting $65 million from the paltry $105 million requested by the Army Corp of Engineers last year.
“'I don’t think anyone could have foreseen terrorists flying into buildings.' 'Iraq will be a cakewalk.' 'I don’t think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees.' It’s the same pattern of obliviousness and evasion repeated ad infinitum by Bush and his sycophants. But this time, the public may be fed up with the administration’s lack of foresight as it appears money earmarked to improve New Orleans' levees was 'moved in the president’s budget,' according to The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 'to pay for homeland security and the war in Iraq...'
"In one fell swoop, Hurricane Katrina exposed the contradictions that lie at the heart of the Bush Administration: the illusion that society can afford disproportionate tax cuts for the wealthy while skimping on basic infrastructure and public safeguards; the conflation that fighting abroad in Iraq is tantamount to defending the homeland; and the delusion that Bush is a uniter not a divider.
"Katrina has revealed that the Emperor has no clothes and that the social fabric in America is badly frayed. The Bush Doctrine has collapsed, an acknowledgement that the anti-terrorism policy the administration has pursued for the last four years has been a catastrophic failure.
"Equally alarming -- in the wake of Katrina -- the administration’s negligence regarding global warming epitomizes their obtuseness; most climatologists have been warning for years that global warming will increase the frequency and intensity of tropical storms. The administration’s response to scientific evidence that challenges their ideological beliefs, of course, was to have the EPA delete any reference to global warming altogether...
"When the political gods -- or the Supreme Court, if you prefer -- decided to trump the will of the American people (including the majority of Floridians who had cast their votes for Al Gore), I assumed it was because the gods prefer tragedy and farce. With Bush they get both: think "Mission Accomplished," with Inspector Clousseau wearing a flight suit and celebrating his triumph over evil-doers, and you’ll find it’s hard not to laugh and cry at the same time."
* - "In fact, FEMA had run a mock disaster exercise a year ago in which the levees were breached by a fictitious 'Hurricane Pam.'"
main text via Youngfox
Post a Comment