"james g. keegan jr." <keegan@nycap.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Xns96CAA002074D7keegannycaprrcom@130.133.1.4...

Haunted by Hesitation
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to
the destruction of New Orleans.

Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching *****
Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice
president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation,
and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate
in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a
weekend home, where "Wedding Crashers" was filmed and where rich
lobbyists hunt.

Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to
make sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city
is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of
Louisiana described the shattered parish as "Baghdad under water,"
the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a
consultation on destroying minority rights.

The water that breached the New Orleans levees and left a million
people homeless and jobless has also breached the White House
defenses. Reality has come flooding in. Since 9/11, the Bush
administration has been remarkably successful at blowing off "the
reality-based community," as it derisively calls the press.

But now, when W., Mr. Cheney, Laura, Rummy, Gen. Richard Myers,
Michael Chertoff and the rest of the gang tell us everything's under
control, our cities are safe, stay the course - who believes them?

This time we can actually see the bodies.

As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to
the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout
of 90,000 square miles of the South.

The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly
throwing away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency
warnings. But the human toll of those mistakes has not been as
viscerally evident because the White House pulled a curtain over the
bodies: the president has avoided the funerals of soldiers, and the
Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead coming home and never
acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed.

But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between
Monday and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary
resources to a disaster that his own general describes as "biblical,"
or even send in the 82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our
eyes.

New Orleans's literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with
the dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous
above- ground cemeteries, its love of vampires and voodoo and
zombies. But now that the city is decimated, reeking with unnecessary
death and destruction, the restless spirits of New Orleans will haunt
the White House.

The administration's foreign policy is entirely constructed around
American self-love - the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are
the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what
we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don't see
freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at
New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice,
where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were
left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the
poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.'s "culture of life."

The president won re-election because he said that the war in Iraq
and the Homeland Security Department would make us safer. Hogwash.

W.'s 2004 convention was staged like "The Magnificent Seven" with the
Republicans' swaggering tough guys - from Rudy Giuliani to Arnold
Schwarzenegger to John McCain - riding in to save an embattled town.

These were the steely-eyed gunslingers we needed to protect us, they
said, not those sissified girlie-men Democrats. But now it turns out
that W. can't save the town, not even from hurricane damage that
everyone has been predicting for years, much less from unpredictable
terrorists.

His campaigns presented the arc of his life story as that of a man
who stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed
a laserlike focus.

But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to
question the president's arc. He's stumbling in Iraq and he's
stumbling on Katrina.

Let's play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in
history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide
one for those who lost their families.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07dowd.html

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Just two points.

Iraq is going exactly as planned.
The rescue operations for NO went exactly as planned.