Haunted by Hesitation

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 7, 2005

WASHINGTON

It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the
destruction of New Orleans.

Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to
the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long
last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping
for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael’s, a retreat in the
Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was
filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt.

Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make
sure that Halliburton’s lucrative contract to rebuild the city is
watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana
described the shattered parish as "Baghdad under water," the vice president
plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying
minority rights.

The water that breached the New Orleans levees and left a million people
homeless and jobless has also breached the White House defenses. Reality has
come flooding in. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been remarkably
successful at blowing off "the reality-based community," as it derisively
calls the press.

But now, when W., Mr. Cheney, Laura, Rummy, Gen. Richard Myers, Michael
Chertoff and the rest of the gang tell us everything’s under control, our
cities are safe, stay the course - who believes them?

This time we can actually see the bodies.

As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the
callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina’s rout of 90,000
square miles of the South.

The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing
away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But
the human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because
the White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided
the funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the
dead coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians
killed.

But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday
and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a
disaster that his own general describes as "biblical," or even send in the
82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes.

New Orleans’s literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with the
dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous above-ground
cemeteries, its love of vampires and voodoo and zombies. But now that the
city is decimated, reeking with unnecessary death and destruction, the
restless spirits of New Orleans will haunt the White House.

The administration’s foreign policy is entirely constructed around American
self-love - the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model
everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don’t see freedom. They
see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see
glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were
saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see
some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for
W.’s "culture of life."

The president won re-election because he said that the war in Iraq and the
Homeland Security Department would make us safer. Hogwash.

W.’s 2004 convention was staged like "The Magnificent Seven" with the
Republicans’ swaggering tough guys - from Rudy Giuliani to Arnold
Schwarzenegger to John McCain - riding in to save an embattled town.

These were the steely-eyed gunslingers we needed to protect us, they said,
not those sissified girlie-men Democrats. But now it turns out that W. can’t
save the town, not even from hurricane damage that everyone has been
predicting for years, much less from unpredictable terrorists.

His campaigns presented the arc of his life story as that of a man who
stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed a
laserlike focus.

But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to question the
president’s arc. He’s stumbling in Iraq and he’s stumbling on Katrina.

Let’s play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history
from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those
who lost their families.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/o...