Another Voice

I repeat below a posting from one of my son's friends.

It took me a few days to get angry at Bush and his administration for the catastrophe in New Orleans. I didn't want to jump to rash conclusions without hearing the facts. Now I have heard the facts, and once again, Bush and company have continued their habit of being incompetent, ignorant, careless, reckless, and dishonest.

Here is an article in the Houston Chronicle from 2001, talking about FEMA's (Federal Emergency Management Agency) prediction in early 2001 (before 9/11) ranking the three most likely, most catastrophic disasters facing the country.

They were:

New Orleans hurricane/flood

New York terrorist attack

San Francisco earthquake

We already know that even after this report but before 9/11, the Bush administration ignored the intelligence memo titled "Bin Laden determined to attack within the US" and that Ashcroft told the justice department that he didn't want to hear anything else about terrorism.

Now we find out that since that FEMA report, the Bush administration and a compliant congress has been slashing budgets for FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers (who knew that the levees needed to be fortified but couldn't finish the work for lack of money), and federal funds for New Orleans flood mitigation and preparedness.

Bush, in an interview on Good Morning America today, said that the breaching of the levees had not been anticipated.

Maybe he just meant it had not been anticipated by him since he previously didn't know what a levee was; he certainly couldn't have meant it had not been explicitly anticipated by the federal government during his presidency. Maybe if he hadn't been so busy giving billions of dollars in tax cuts to the already rich, and making sure his friends in the oil industry get extra, extra richer (while, by the way, the poverty rate in this country has now increased for the 4th straight year), it might have been easier to pay for the completion of the Army Corps of Engineers levee project, but that would have also involved the recognition of science as a credible way to make assessments, and we know that Bush and his gang are hostile to science.

Also, here is a related editorial from the New York Times:

But the right wing says that the NY Times is too liberal, so let's hear from a conservative newspaper, the New Hampshire Union Leader:They lament Bush's "diffident detachment unsuitable for the leader of a nation facing war, natural disaster and economic uncertainty."