| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
05 Sep 2005 09:00:31 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Team Bush's bad day in Wyoming |
Team Bush's bad day in Wyoming
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1562646,00.html
It wasn't just all the president's men who failed in Katrina's wake
Peter Preston
Monday September 5, 2005
The Guardian
The grisliest quote of the week, the one to cut out and keep, came when
reporters asked Lea Anne McBride what her boss was doing as New Orleans
sank, stank and suppurated. "He's working from Wyoming today," said
Vice-President ***** Cheney's official spokesman brightly. At which
point - against all odds - you began to feel slightly sorry for George
Bush.
No one with any semblance of rationality can pretend that Bush carries
personal blame for the debacle of New Orleans. He didn't personally go
through the fine print of recent budgets and strike out the item marked
"Levees, strengthening of". He didn't personally choose the federal
emergency mastermind for such crises (a former selector of horse-show
judges). As a notoriously light reader, he clearly never clapped eyes
on commodious newspaper and official warnings of hurricane wrath to
come.
Peter Preston
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/49bfac2dff24e5aa
Bush mafia
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/7033ca1f9656d7ab
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Team Bush's bad day in Wyoming |
09 Sep 2005 02:54:29 AM |
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On 5 Sep 2005 02:00:31 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote:
Team Bush's bad day in Wyoming
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1562646,00.html
It wasn't just all the president's men who failed in Katrina's wake
Peter Preston
Monday September 5, 2005
The Guardian
The grisliest quote of the week, the one to cut out and keep, came when
reporters asked Lea Anne McBride what her boss was doing as New Orleans
sank, stank and suppurated. "He's working from Wyoming today," said
Vice-President ***** Cheney's official spokesman brightly. At which
point - against all odds - you began to feel slightly sorry for George
Bush.
No one with any semblance of rationality can pretend that Bush carries
personal blame for the debacle of New Orleans. He didn't personally go
through the fine print of recent budgets and strike out the item marked
"Levees, strengthening of". He didn't personally choose the federal
emergency mastermind for such crises (a former selector of horse-show
judges). As a notoriously light reader, he clearly never clapped eyes
on commodious newspaper and official warnings of hurricane wrath to
come.
The president was on holiday, as usual, when Katrina roared in from
the Gulf of Mexico last Monday. Perhaps he took the first TV reports -
that New Orleans had missed the worst - as gospel, and went for a jog.
Perhaps his staff didn't want to wake him. The mythology of
"commander-in-chief" and the reality were starkly separated again.
It's foolish to dump everything (including the historic woes and
racial divisions of a city born to sing the blues) on poor George
alone.
Leaders of great nations facing great trouble depend on the team and
the professionalism around them. Tony Blair didn't jet back from his
winter break by the Red Sea when the tsunami struck. He left John
Prescott to handle the meetings and Whitehall's machine to handle the
detail.
He knows that, apart from a few ceremonial appearances in 7/7 mode, it
doesn't matter whether he's there or not when true disaster strikes.
You can't invent a functioning bureaucracy overnight. You can't
hand-deliver tonnes of bottled water to the thirsty yourself. The
thing is either organised, long since organised - or it's not. So back
to Wyoming.
Nobody, in the late 90s when the Republican party searched for a
standard-bearer, turned to Bush for his magnificent managerial skills.
He'd part-owned a baseball team and part-superintended a small,
struggling oil company, but his only relevant job had been governor of
Texas. He was chosen as folksy symbol, heir to a dynasty, born-again
communicator: and he fitted that bill well enough.
But fine detail and hard grind? No way. This was where Cheney came in:
a vice-president apart, deeply experienced runner of defence
departments, congressional offices and giant corporations. He'd handle
the tough stuff while George did front of house. The rarely posed
question in the fifth year of this administration is: whatever
happened to that neat division of labour?
You can, to be sure, trace many of Team Bush's woes - especially the
decision to take on Saddam - to an ideology that couldn't stand
practical scrutiny. You can certainly trace much of the antipathy
towards the president, domestic and international, to his policies and
the way he presents them. But the dreadful lesson of New Orleans has
very little to do with rhetorical postures. It is the problem of
delivery that keeps letting America down.
Look at the prelude to 9/11 - where ever more damning details of
bureaucratic blindness and non-cooperation still surface - and the
failure to head off al-Qaida's amateurish attacks was a shambles. Look
at the intelligence tangle before Iraq - and the massive post-invasion
decisions (like disbanding the Iraqi army) that have wrecked bold
hopes ever since. More shambles from bureaucrat Bremer. Look at the
Baghdad taps that don't flow to this day and the electricity that goes
off and on. Look at the Big Uneasy.
Of course, the *****-up theory of history dogs every jot of
administrative life, from Stockwell tube station on. Of course, we
have our own child support agencies and similar shames. And, of
course, Whitehall probably wouldn't function too smoothly under six
feet of water if the Thames barrier burst. Yet there is, from
administration to administration, a problem here that is more than
politics, vituperation and blame.
America, for all its wealth and thirst for economic change, is a
stagnant pond for constitutional reformers. Nothing fundamental
changes much in the byzantine division of responsibilities between
city, state and federal government - except that the states grow
gradually more feeble as giant agencies come and go.
Cheney, a supposed foe of bureaucracy, has steered his pupil in weird
directions here - including the creation of a monstrous homeland
security department, run by counter-terrorist hands, that has all but
swallowed up poor Fema, the designated disasters agency. Would a dirty
bomb in Bourbon Street have been better handled? Maybe. But dirty
water was nowhere on Washington's radar.
Put accusations of racial prejudice and callousness, however vehement,
to one side for a moment and concentrate on the main event: a machine
that didn't work when the waves swept in. The charge that lingers most
acridly is one of incompetence, inertia, incapacity; and the means of
putting that right stretch far beyond a few sackings and shufflings.
Blame Bush? Naturally. This shambles is on his watch. But don't fail
to ask the more difficult questions either. Does free-market scorn for
public services and its salary structure make for third-rate public
servants? Do election-related democratic upheavals of administrative
tenure every four years bring expertise or confusion? Does our
solitary superpower boast a superpowered administrative engine - or an
old banger in need of total refurbishment? Don't ask poor George. This
isn't his bag. But what about working it through one fine day in
Wyoming?
mailto:p.preston@guardian.co.uk
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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