Anyway, here are a few choice excerpts from Maureen Dowd's demolition of the Bush Administration. I hope anyone who believes that we should make excuses for our "compassionate conservative" President reads this:
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins....Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
[...]
Not only was the money [to save New Orleans' sinking levees] depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
[...]
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
[...]
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
Who are we? We're a country run by people who believe that "only the little people pay taxes." By people who only care about their rich buddies in ExxonMobil, Halliburton, etc. By people who were -- according to Dowd - vacationing in Wyoming yesterday (Cheney), and "shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attend[ing] 'Spamalot' before bloggers chased her back to Washington."
Let's face it, this is the "let them eat cake" Administration, the final excesses of the rot that the Republican Party has now subjected us to since at least 2001. The result? The country's a disaster, and the Republicans can't blame anyone but themselves - they're the ones who've held all the levers of power the past 4 1/2 years. Oh wait, I'm sure they'll try to blame Bill Clinton, who only managed to preside over peace, prosperity, and a budget surplus during the 1990s. How terrible.
Luckily, Bill Clinton's in a fighting mood, commenting yesterday that he might have "assaulted" House Speaker Dennis Hastert for his assinine and insensitive remark about "bulldoz[ing]" New Orleans. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi slammed President Bush for saying that the federal response had been "adequate" (after first saying it was "not adequate" -- is that known as a "flip flop?"). Pelosi's response to Bush? "Compassion is a wonderful thing. But it's no substitute for food, water, medicine, education for children," she said. Pelosi added that Bush's "adequate" response comment was an "insult" to the suffering people of New Orleans.
Good for them. Now, let's get an investigation going right way into what the hell George W. Bush has been doing the past four years since 9/11 on "securing the homeland." Obviously, he's failed miserably, but how much corruption and incompetence is involved is something worth looking into. Whoops, I forgot, the whole government is controlled by Bush's party so there are no checks and balances.
Virginians, let's not the make the same mistake by electing Jerry "Eavesdropping Scandal" Kilgore this November.