We Needed a Great President Last Week, But We Didn't Get One
What's that old Rumsfeld line again? I think he said, "You go to War with the Army you have." Last week, America experienced one of its greatest catastrophes, and we had to go into that disaster with the president we have. Unfortunately, we had George Bush in the White House.
Actually, he was nowhere near the White House. He was on vacation. It's a shame that Terri Schiavo's body wasn't still kept alive and maintained in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Bush did, after all, interrupt one of his vacations last March to fly -- in the middle of the night -- all the way back to Washington D.C. to sign legislation to keep Schiavo's body on life support. Had Schiavo been in New Orleans during the Katrina aftermath, Bush would have sent an entire division in on Monday evening to rescue her body, and perhaps some of those troops could have remained and helped the people who were actually still alive.
Oh, I'm sorry -- did I write that Bush was on vacation? I guess that on the day Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, our president cut his vacation short so he could -- well, deliver a speech in California regarding how great a job he was doing in Iraq. Or was he still technically on vacation when he delivered that speech? Unfortunately, we may not know the answer to that and other questions until Bush enters retirement and writes his much anticipated book on travel and leisure.
Dick Cheney, the one who actually runs the show, was nowhere to be found during the Katrina aftermath. Cheney's excuse for avoiding Vietnam was that he had "other priorities." I'm looking forward to hearing what his other priorities were this last week. I'm sure they had something to do with GOP fund-raising -- if he wasn't on vacation, that is. We do, however, know where Condi Rice was. She was buying a shit-load of expensive shoes in NYC. She also attended a Broadway musical on Wednesday night. Good for her.
Perhaps Condi stayed away from D.C. because of all the in-fighting that was going on there. Administration officials who weren't on vacation were debating for days about who was actually in charge of the Katrina response. Meanwhile, people were dying needlessly in New Orleans. Where's Alexander "I'm In Charge Here" Haig when you need him?
The thing I find the most remarkable -- from a purely political standpoint -- is the opportunity the Bush Administration pissed away. The Katrina aftermath gave Bush the perfect chance to revive his faltering presidency. Sure, he still would have had to contend with the fact that his tax cuts for the rich and his misadventure in Iraq pulled important funding away from the flood control programs in Louisiana, but how many Americans really pay attention to minutiae like that? Hell, over 40% of the U.S. still believes that Iraqis were flying the hijacked planes on 9-11.
Bush, with the help of his Congressional friends, could have easily weathered any political shit-storm that emerged from the funding-cut issue. And all he needed to do to get that help in Congress was appear on the ball and in charge before, during, and after Katrina hit.
Instead, Bush fumbled the ball, and his Congressional allies are now going to have a much more difficult time covering up for him. Indeed, political expediency may force some of Bush's supporters in Congress to discontinue their efforts to prop up an Administration that is now widely seen as incompetent and out of touch. The 2006 mid-term elections are, after all, just around the corner, and there are a lot of angry voters out there.
Bush's big problem, of course, was that he couldn't control the images coming out of New Orleans like he could with the Iraq Debacle. It is, for example, pretty easy for the commander-in-chief to enforce an order that no pictures be taken of caskets returning from a war zone. Bush's failure, however, to move quickly in response to the Gulf Coast disaster allowed the media to go in there and give the world an unobstructed view of the horrors left in Katrina's wake. As a result, many attempts by BushCo and its apologists to "focus on the positive" were met with angry responses from on-the-scene television personalities who just weren't buying it.
This country has often had the good fortune of strong leadership during times of crisis. We had Lincoln during the Civil War, FDR during the Great Depression and World War II, and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. No such luck this time. I've often referred to Bush as arguably the worst American president of all time. There doesn't seem to be a need for argument on that point anymore.
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