SPINNING IN CIRCLES

SPINNING IN CIRCLES

By Peter Fredson

A minor rant in the aftermath of Katrina

September 4, 2005

Coincidence? Just before the Twin Towers attack George W. Bush was on vacation, getting on with his life, cutting brush on his ranch. After the attack Bush was reading a kid’s book, got on a plane, headed for a bunker, then later stood on rubble with his arm around a fireman. For the next 2 years he made speeches about his heroic action in failing to recognize that terrorists would strike the U.S. and exploited 9/11 to the hilt.

Several days ago George W. Bush was on vacation, getting on with his life, cutting brush on his ranch. He couldn’t get on with his life because an annoying woman, Cindy Sheehan, insisted in asking him what noble cause led him to declare war on Iraq. He heard of a huge hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast, but he had speeches to make about 9/11, about social security, and about his flypaper strategy to kill Muslims.

Then he waited a couple of days playing guitar, eating cake, and regretfully terminating his vacation from his “hard” job. When he had all his sycophants in place he took them on a tour of the ravaged area from Katrina for photo-ops. All other activities came to a halt so that Bush could appear sincere and noble and hand out sandwiches to a couple of people assembled for the solemn occasion.

Immediately after the photos were taken, Bush departed and the hastily assembled food distribution center was abandoned, its purpose having been accomplished. He visited a levee with a crane at work, and after the photos were taken, he departed, the crane stopped work, and the reporters continued with their eulogy of the War President.

But Bush did look out of a window of his plane while flying over the flooded area. Then he went back to have a good meal and talk the situation over with a man who had no previous experience with emergencies, but was a True Believer in the Bush mold, so that made him eligible to head the entire Disaster effort. He did know about horses, and had looked at many horse’s asses in his experience, so he got along well with GWB.

The next step was to get together with his flunkies to assign blame to everybody not connected to GWB. The criticism came quickly.

The president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, Aaron Broussard, issued an emotional appeal on NBC’s MEET THE PRESS. By the end, he was sobbing uncontrollably:

Broussard said: “We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. ... Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Broussard discussed difficulties local authorities had with FEMA, including one case where they actually posted armed guards to keep FEMA from cutting their communications lines: “We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA, we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. When we got there with our trucks, FEMA says don’t give you the fuel. Yesterday FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines.”

A blogger commented: “Last year the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction evacuated 1.5 million people in advance of a category 5 hurricane without the loss of a single life.”

But Bush and his Ambassador Morton look down on the U.N. and think they can learn nothing from anyone at the U.N. We fully expect Bush to give all his incompetent bureaucrats the MEDAL OF FREEDOM when he finishes bragging about what a splendid job they all did.

Right now all the Bush corporate sponsors are deliriously happy. Not only can they make billions selling arms and munitions to blow up Iraq but they can make additional billions in “reconstructing” the Gulf Coast. Evidently corruption and inefficiency are no deterrent to letting corporations make unholy profits from disaster.

Millennium Corporation, for instance, has gotten a contract to help reconstruct in the Gulf. Evidently all their graft, corruption, theft and inefficiency are part of the Bush strategy to help them make unlimited profits without any serious investigation.

Bush doesn’t believe in Global Warming. The Bush sycophants state that this disaster was unforeseeable. There have been many warnings, some quite specific about levees and disaster plans. But somehow all the warnings were ignored so Bush supporters could get on with their lives without being annoyed by nonsense about environment. We wonder if a massive terrorist attack is foreseeable to them?

But all that is explained away by the Bush people. Right now they are launching public relations gimmicks to show how noble, charitable and efficient they are, and how criticism of them is treason.

Now they want to talk about “Uniting, not Dividing” only 5 years too late. They still don’t like to discuss race, poverty, homelessness, but if they could blame everything on God without seeming to be irreligious, they would certainly do so.

Judging from the inadequate and unprepared Bush bureaucrats, they would let terrorists bring in nuclear weapons to blow up some major city, then look for someone to blame, while pointing to their heroic stance during 9/11 and asking people to pray.

Greater stupidity hath no man.