Here's what New Orleans looked like on Tuesday:
Here's what President George W. Bush was doing on Tuesday:
That's right, he was 1500 miles away in San Diego. Looks like he's having a pretty fucking good time, doesn't he? I bet he's having more fun than this guy is.
If you're wondering exactly what Bush-buddy Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, did right before he was appointed to his current post, he was getting fired from his last job--running horse shows. That's right--he was too much of a fuck-up to organize horse shows, but perfect material to organize rescue operations.
Another great indication of how badly the Bush administration has bungled this is that even his toadies in the mass media are--slowly--starting to turn on him. Even Bill O'Reilly and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post have offered half-hearted criticisms. You can read a few of them here (this one includes a rip by the very Bush-friendly Washington Times and here, where we find out just how clueless the politicians in charge actually are.
To be fair, Bush isn't the only fuck-up here. Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco was too slow to order the National Guard in to help keep the peace, and then ordered police officers to “shoot and kill” anyone they saw looting. New Orleans Ray Nagin’s evacuation procedures were pitiful. And the rest of the state government had no trouble organizing a special election to pass an amendment banning gay marriage--surely a much less important issue than strengthening the levees. The current levees were built to withstand a Category 3 storm, but not a Category 4, which is how Katrina was classified. And when Bush says, as I quoted in a previous post, that nobody could have predicted that the levees would collapse, when in fact it has been well-documented that they would collapse under Katrina-like conditions, that is cluelessness of the highest order, even by his standards.
