Re: Bush is either a liar, or an idiot, or both.



Winfield Hill wrote: 
Jim Thompson wrote...

I'm having trouble finding the facts.  Is "idiot" a fact?  Your
not striking any nerves of mine, I just find that you have an
extraordinary hair up your *** about W.  Why is that specifically?



 Bush is either a liar, an idiot, or both.  Here are some more facts,
 typical of what I post.  This is an except from the Times-Picayune
 Sunday Sept 4th open letter to George Bush.  I took special interest
 in this letter because I witnessed all the statements they quote, and
 was flabbergasted to hear them at the time.  Doesn't anyone see these
 for the bold lies they are?, I thought.  I involuntarily blurted out
 to my wife, in the other room, "They're a bunch of complete idiots!"
 It was very upsetting.

 http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/04/katrina.blame/index.html
 http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/04/times.picayune.editorial/index.html

 "It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside
 the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear
 to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out
 of the city immediately?  We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane
 Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term
 shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen
 to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning,
 overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other
 essentials?

 "State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't
 have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!"  Every official at the
 Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael
 Brown especially.

 "In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency
 hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were
 stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.  He gave another
 nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've
 provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've
 gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

 "Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

 "Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're
 doing a heck of a job."

 "That's unbelievable.

 "There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the
 riverfront is high ground.  The fact that so many people had reached
 there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there,
 too."

----
But what can we expect from an idiot President who appoints a fired
Judge of Arabian horses to head up FEMA? A few minutes with Google:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007039.php
Here's plain talk, describing FEMA head Michael Brown, "An unmitigated,
total fucking disaster." http://dailykos.com/story/2005/9/2/34622/68348
Also, http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_08_28.php


 And next Bush gives us the sobering prospect of an unknown right-wing
 activist to head the third branch of government the rest of his life,
 http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/05/roberts.nomination/



I think you are being unreasonably critical, because you don't have a clue of the all the things that need to be done to mobilize a response. Five days is not bad at all considering that the first responders, state emergency personnel and National Guard, were knocked out themselves. The majority of National Guard personnel must be contacted by phone and notified to report for duty, phone lines were down in a lot of places, and many of them probably had their own personal emergencies to deal with. That is just one example of how time consuming the mobilization is.

 And as for FEMA- it was summed up nicely:


"Chertoff said FEMA is not equipped to send large numbers of people to help during a disaster.

Instead, he said, "FEMA basically plugs in to the existing state and local infrastructure. What happened here was, essentially, the demolishment of that state and local infrastructure and, I think, that really caused a cascading series of breakdowns."

The lessons from Katrina may result in a change in the way FEMA responds to such emergencies, moving from playing a supportive role to playing a more central role, he said."

FEMA , by design, is a bureaucracy, and not an emergency relief by way of actually providing material- they only make arrangements.

The relief operation is going very well- you obviously have no experience with real world complexity of this scale- all you can do is knuckle down and do the best with what you have - against all odds, problems, mistakes, and confusion- just keep plugging and slugging. Even though I don't care for him very much, I give George Bush high marks on this one. It doesn't take a non-idiot to be useful in cases like this, and he apparently knew something was up because he took the unprecedented step of telling the NO mayor and state governor that they were not moving fast enough on the evacuation several days prior to the arrival time.

.