Usually I find myself quoting the Washington Post or New York Times when they blast the latest abomination by Bush or the Republican Congress. Those papers, however, are widely considered -- falsely, in my humble opinion -- members of the "liberal media." However, nobody can accuse the Washington Times of liberal bias. Quite the contrary, this is a paper of the right-wing Republicans, by the right-wing Republicans, and for the right-wing Republicans. Which makes it al lthe more dramatic and powerful when they criticize the utter failure of leadership that is George W. Bush. Here are excerpts from today's lead Washington TIMES editorial:
Troops are finally moving into New Orleans in realistic numbers, and it's past time. What took the government so long? The thin veneer separating civilization and chaos, which we earlier worried might collapse in the absence of swift action, has collapsed.[...]
A Mississippi man murdered his own sister over a bag of ice. Rotting bodies float free above submerged streets and crying children haven't eaten in days. Their parents plead from rooftops for rescue, and survivors of the flood line the freeways by the thousands, stumbling in the sweltering heat with no food, no water and no place to go. If this is not hell, it is close to it.
[...]
We expected to see, many hours ago, the president we saw standing atop the ruin of the World Trade Center, rallying a dazed country to action. We're pleased he finally caught a ride home from his vacation, but he risks losing the one trait his critics have never dented: His ability to lead, and be seen leading.
He returns to the scene of the horror today, and that's all to the good. His presence will rally broken spirits. But he must crack heads, if bureaucratic heads need cracking, to get the food, water and medicine to the people crying for help in New Orleans and on the Mississippi coast. The list of things he has promised is a good list, but there is no time to dally, whether by land, sea or air. We should have delivered them yesterday. Americans are dying.
That's right, Americans are dying -- in Louisiana, Mississippi, and also Iraq. Think there's no connection between Iraq and the pitiful response so far to Hurricane Katrina? Well, think again! The fact is, the National Guard forces that should be providing "Homeland Security" are mired down in Iraq, stretched thin. The money that could have been spent on preparation for (and response to!) a Category 5 hurricane is wasted on tax giveaways to ExxonMobil, Ken Lay, Halliburton, and -- once again -- the war in Iraq. Action on global warming that might have begun to reduce the intensity of storms like Katrina (most scientists agree on this subject) is AWOL, despite Bush's promise in the 2000 Presidential campaign to do something about it.
Meanwhile, Mike Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, appointed by George W. Bush, is described as "an unmitigated, total fucking disaster" at his former job as head of the International Arabian Horse Association. Brown apparently ran that organization nearly into the ground, and was forced to resign "in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray."
To make matters worse, the effectiveness of FEMA - wildly successful during the 1990s under Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton -- has been seriously harmed by being buried (back in March 2003) in the disjointed, dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security, instead of being an independent agency that could actually get things done. According to former FEMA director James Lee Witt, "Putting FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security has minimized their effectiveness in responding, in planning and training, the national hurricane program, everything."
Finally, President Bush has utterly failed to provide the type of leadership -- rally the nation, call us to something greater than ourselves, express our feelings in words, tell us what we can and must do -- this country deserves, and that other great Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt Ronald Reagan were able to do. Instead of rallying the country, Bush was whining yesterday about how "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Yeah, just like how Condi Rice talked about how she didnt' "think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon -- that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." The thing is, LOTS of people DID see both events as possiblities. There were numerous analyses done of these things, but apparently Bush and Rice either don't read or only get the filtered version? Or maybe they're just incompetent?
As far as George W. Bush is concerned, perhaps part of the explanation for his utter cluelessness is the life that he's led. For instance, despite his absurd pretentions to being a true Texas rancher, Bush actually spent his "youth" (up until at least the age of 40) partying, being irresponsible, drinking heavily, attending elite northeastern prep schools and Ivy League schools where he proudly didn't learn a damn thing, avoiding military service in Vietnam, and having his daddy's friends bail him out time and time again when he failed at yet another business venture. Now, Bush continues his string of success into the White House, and we see exactly the disastrous results -- surpluses into deficits, security into vulnerability, poverty into more poverty, rich people into even richer people, thriving cities into disasters -- that we could have and should have expected. Frankly, I blame Bush for this, but I also blame the American people. When are we going to wake up and collectively say, "the [Republican Party/Bush] emperor has no clothes?"
The bottom line is that today, nearly four years since 9/11, and under the leadership of right-wing Republicans like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, our country is LESS PREPARED than ever for a natural disaster of terrorist attack. We are certainly far poorer and far less secure today than we were on 9/10/01. The Republicans -- those great "national security" people -- have squandered our hard-earned surplus, gotten us bogged down in an unwinnable war in Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11, of course), divided the country badly, utterly failed to provide leadership on urgent environmental problems, and completely neglected the infrastructure of OUR OWN COUNTRY while they play their deadly games in the Middle East. This is exactly how great empires fall, as Paul Kennedy pointed out in his classic book, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers."
Yes, this is "Republican leadership," an oxymoron if I've ever heard one -- except for the Orwellian phrase "compassionate conservative," of course. Let's face it, today's Republican Party is a group of harsh, stupid, venal, selfish, ruthless religious zealots and neo-con ideologues. This is definitively NOT your father's -- or grandfather's -- Republican Party, that of Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, or even Richard Nixon for that matter. Instead, today's Republican Party is a bunch of radicals and incompetents, many of whom deserve to be in jail, not in Congress or the Governorship.
And let's be clear: Jerry Kilgore fits this mold to a "t." Don't let him fool you in any way, shape or form. Jerry Kilgore is not for you, he doesn't "trust" you, in fact he's deathly afraid of you ("the people" he claims, absurdly, to "trust"). As well he should be. Because, frankly, Jerry Kilgore is a corrupt loser who cares only about is pleasing his corporate taskmasters, big donors, and Fundamentalist Preacher friends like Pat "God doesn't hear the prayer of a Jew" Robertson. Needless to say, Jerry Kilgore is NOT someone who should be let anywhere near the Virginia governor's mansion. God help us if this George W. Bush Republican ever manages to slime his way in there.