Irresponsible "Leadership"

I'm driven by recent events to spew vinegar and HCL here on this blog. Whether we speak of this now or in the future my views will be the same. The Bush Administration's handling of the events in terrorized Louisiana and Mississippi is at the very least irresponsible. What's irritating is that Bush didn't have solid people under him. A friend of mine's father spent 12 years acquiring the skills it takes to run a state disaster agency. TWELVE YEARS of seminars and education. He was a career police officer who made it his business to understand disaster preparedness. I spoke with his personnel at length - they too were experts. I put basic questions to them about disaster readiness and how they would cope - just to understand better about my state and its requirements. What delighted me was that they DIDN'T have answers to some questions. BUT the difference between them and Bush and his FEMA director is that these people DID have answers for the most important questions about how to organize in the face of sweeping disaster. It's very apparent that the current administration has no basis for coping with what they see. People have died needlessly. Now Bush backtracks and tries to say that we couldn't have been better prepared, that even Category 5 or 6 levies couldn't have prevented what happened. This man in our Oval Office is Pinnocchio, for sure. Because to say that our coastal cities can't withstand Category 5 or 6 hurricanes is troublesome at the very least. And that's what he's having the Army Corps of Engineers say. They're saying that the floods in New Orleans weren't preventable. That no levies could have withstood those waters.

Your heart goes out to these victims because you wonder how you would cope in the same place. These people have lost their lives, their homes, their cultures. Families have been broken up. And the number of lives lost. I think of Fats Domino, as treasured as he was, and there he stayed in the thick of the storm, rescued like some ordinary person. But there he was, a victim of his own desire to stick it out. How many were not rescued that stuck it out - they died horrible deaths.

President Carter today gave us a lesson in global warming and its impacts. He's saying he warned us and that scientests have warned us since. But that lecture falls on deaf ears. George Bush thinks global warming is for geeks and freaks. He doesn't even connect the dots between the hurricane we just had and global warming. In his mind the two aren't even connected.

But then what do you expect from a man who has been caught giving America the "birdie" at least 27 times...our friends in Crawford saw that for themselves.

So that's my blog for this moment...more later.