President Bush has failed the American people at the most basic level. He has failed to keep America’s citizens safe from harm. The latest incident involves Hurricane Katrina and the federal government’s complete lack of preparation and painfully slow reaction and to the deadly tragedy which claimed tens of thousands of lives in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
There are so many questions arising out of the government’s poor handling of the crises that it will likely take years to sort out what happened. We can be sure there will be commissions and investigations and finger pointing all over Washington and Baton Rouge and the New Orleans City government. The bottom line is this: tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die if the government had planned in advance and put its priorities in the proper place. The plain truth is, saving the lives of thousands of mostly poor, mostly African-American residents in and around New Orleans was simply not a priority of the Bush administration. Mr. Bush has yet more blood on his hands.
It’s not like the government could say it had no idea this could happen. Prior to September 11, 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said that the three largest disasters facing the United States would be a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans and a major earthquake in San Francisco. The writing was on the wall.
Army engineers and local studies knew that the levees, as they were set up, would not hold in the case of a major storm.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to 'The Times-Picayune' in New Orleans, 'It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.'
Basically, the president’s budget priority was more concerned with taking lives in Fallujah than saving lives in New Orleans.
After the storm hit, however, the president had the nerve to tell Diane Sawyer, 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.'
That statement is either extremely insincere or extremely ignorant. Either one is extremely dangerous.
There were attempts made to gain the government’s attention. The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House reduced it to about $40 million.
$40 million may sound like a lot but compared to other pork laden projects that were agreed to by Congress and the Bush administration, it’s hardly a drop in the bucket. President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island. If just half of that money would have gone to the people of New Orleans to protect them from a hurricane the results may have been different. But the bottom line remains, Republican Senators from Alaska have more political influence with the White House than Democratic Congressman representing mostly poor and mostly black New Orleans city residents.
The Bush administration also continued to cut the budget and the priority it was giving FEMA. The president appointed Michael Brown to be the head of FEMA. Brown’s previous experience that qualified him for the job? He had been the head of the International Arabian Horse Association and of course was an old friend of President Bush’s.
As of last Thursday, three full days after Katrina hit, Brown admitted to the press that he did not know there were 15,000 people at the New Orleans Convention Center who were without food, dehydrated, without adequate shelter and medication and in many cases dying. All he had to do to learn that was turn on the television. There were reports on CNN, MSNBC, all three major networks and even Fox News. Anybody who spent time watching the newspaper or watching TV over the past four days knew what was going on. Nearly everybody, that is, except the man the president appointed to be responsible for knowing and doing something about it.
There is no acceptable explanation that the national guard should take four days to get troops to New Orleans and its surrounding areas to get food, medicine and water to people and to help airlift them out. If CNN can get a camera crew and reporters there immediately, why can’t the National Guard do the same? There is no excuse and tens of thousands of people may have died as a result.
Meanwhile, according to a report in the 'Chicago Tribune,' the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients. Help was available, but it was not given.
Of course, the Louisiana National Guard (and every other National Guard in this country) is weakened as a result of so many of its members serving in the president’s folly of a war in Iraq. It is estimated that 30 percent of the Louisiana National Guard’s manpower and 50 percent of its equipment are in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Has the president gotten so involved in a foreign invasion he started on questionable grounds at best that we cannot even protect our own people from harm? This is a disgrace.
It took Mr. Bush a full five days to arrive in New Orleans after Katrina hit the area. Before even returning to Washington and ending his five week Crawford vacation, he made a speech in California defending America’s ongoing involvement in Iraq which he had the audacity to compare to World War II.
Please remember that when motivated, Mr. Bush can act quickly. In order to prolong the existence of Terri Schiavo, he cut short his vacation in Crawford and immediately flew to Washington D.C. to sign a special law into effect. That law concerned but one person. Yet Mr. Bush did not rush back to Washington to deal with the aftermath of Katrina when tens of thousands of lives were at stake.
When Bush finally did arrive in the area hit by the storm, a full five days after Katrina hit, he again took the wrong tone. The president recalled the great times he had in the 'Big Easy' during his youthful partying days. He also focused on the fact that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but vowed it would be rebuilt and that he was 'looking forward to sitting on the porch someday.'
In addition to the complete lack of competence, the key figures in the administration were also lacking empathy. According to the 'New York Times,' Bush’s inner circle spent the first few days after Katrina hit doing very little in response to the devastation. Dick Cheney was on vacation in Wyoming, Condoleezza Rice was shoe shopping at a boutique on Fifth Avenue in New York and caught a showing of 'Spamalot' on Broadway. Andy Card was reportedly in Maine. The Bushies were almost literally fiddling while New Orleans fell into the chaos of desperation, despair and death.
The images all Americans saw on their televisions did not apparently move the president and his inner circle to act with haste and urgency. The first 72 hours after a hurricane or similar natural disaster are the most critical. Yet it took four days or longer for desperately needed help from the National Guard to reach New Orleans. There are no excuses. The government failed its people at the most basic level.
Americans are entitled to political differences. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about how much money the government should spend on different programs. Should be build a defense shield in outer space or spend more money on schools? Should we fund additional stem cell research or pay farmers not to grow certain crops?
But there should be no question about the fact that the government must be able to protect its people from preventable harm. That isn’t politics, that’s the job of government at its most fundamental level. There is no debate here: the Bush administration has failed its people. And the blood of tens of thousands of Americans and the needless suffering of tens of thousands more can testify to that. When it comes to the present administration’s handling of Katrina and its aftermath, the president has few supporters but many apologists.
So right before our eyes, New Orleans appeared to become a third world nation. People with no homes, no food were walking in waste deep water filled with corpses and human feces and Lord knows what else in a desperate attempt to survive. Many of them didn’t.
To paraphrase John Lennon, Mr. President: 'How do you sleep nights?'
