| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Zizek!" |
| Date: |
28 Aug 2006 08:40:01 AM |
| Object: |
Bush at the Scene of the Crime |
Bush & Katrina: Return to the Scene of the Crime
by Frank Rich
President Bush travels to the Gulf Coast this week, ostensibly to mark
the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Everyone knows his real mission:
to try to make us forget the first anniversary of the downfall of his
presidency.
As they used to say in the French Quarter, bonne chance! The
ineptitude bared by the storm - no planning for a widely predicted
catastrophe, no attempt to secure a city besieged by looting, no strategy
for anything except spin - is indelible. New Orleans was Iraq redux with an
all-American cast. The discrepancy between Mr. Bush's "heckuva job" shtick
and the reality on the ground induced a Cronkite-in-Vietnam epiphany for
news anchors. At long last they and the country demanded answers to the
questions about the administration's competence that had been soft-pedaled
two years earlier when the war first went south.
What's amazing on Katrina's first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush
seems aware of this change in the political weather. He's still in a bubble.
At last week's White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom
Cruise on the "Today" show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish
criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on
the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, "Nothing," adding that
"nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein
ordered the attacks." Like the emasculated movie star, the president is
still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy
such nonsense.
As the rest of the world knows, the White House connived 24/7 to pound
in the suggestion that Saddam ordered the attacks on 9/11. "The Bush
administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq war to Sept. 11," Thomas Kean
and Lee Hamilton write in "Without Precedent," their new account of their
stewardship of the 9/11 commission. The nonexistent Qaeda-Saddam tie-in was
as much a selling point for the war as the nonexistent W.M.D. The
salesmanship was so merciless that half the country was brainwashed into
believing that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis.
To achieve this feat, ***** Cheney spent two years publicly hyping a
"pretty well confirmed" (translation: unconfirmed) pre-9/11 meeting in
Prague between Mohamed Atta and a Saddam intelligence officer, continuing to
do so long after this specious theory had been discredited. Mr. Bush's
strategy was to histrionically stir 9/11 and Iraq into the same sentence
whenever possible, before the invasion and after. Typical was his May 1,
2003, oration declaring the end of "major combat operations." After noting
that "the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on
September 11th, 2001," he added: "With those attacks, the terrorists and
their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they
got." To paraphrase the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, this
was tantamount to saying that the Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941, and
war with Mexico is what they got.
Were it not so tragic, Mr. Bush's claim that he had never suggested a
connection between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq would be as ludicrous as Bill
Clinton's doomed effort to draw a distinction between sex and oral sex. The
tragedy is that the country ever believed Mr. Bush, particularly those
Americans who were moved to enlist because of 9/11 and instead ended up
fighting a war that the president now concedes had "nothing" to do with the
9/11 attacks.
A representative and poignant example, brought to light by The Los
Angeles Times, is Patrick R. McCaffrey, a Silicon Valley auto-body-shop
manager with two children who joined the California National Guard one month
after 9/11. He was eager to do his bit for homeland security by helping
protect the Shasta Dam or Golden Gate Bridge. Instead he was sent to Iraq,
where he was killed in 2004. In a replay of the Pentagon subterfuge
surrounding the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, another post-9/11
enlistee betrayed by his country, Mr. McCaffrey's death was at first
officially attributed to an ambush by insurgents. Only after two years of
investigation did the Army finally concede that his killers were actually
the Iraqi security forces he was helping to train.
"He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there," his
mother, Nadia McCaffrey, told the paper. Last week's belated presidential
admission that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on America that
inspired Patrick McCaffrey's service was implicitly an admission that he and
many like him died in Iraq for nothing as well.
Mr. Bush's press-conference disavowalof his habitual efforts to
connect 9/11 to Saddam will be rolled back by the White House soon enough.
When the fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrives in two weeks, you can bet that
the president will once again invoke the Qaeda attacks to justify the Iraq
war, especially now that we are adding troops (through the involuntary
call-up of reservists) rather than subtracting any. The new propaganda
strategy will be right out of Lewis Carroll: If we leave the country that
had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again.
But before we get to that White House P.R. offensive, there is next
week's Katrina show. It has its work cut out for it. A year after the storm,
the reconstruction of New Orleans echoes our reconstruction of Baghdad. A
"truth squad" of House Democrats has cataloged the "waste, fraud, abuse or
mismanagement" in $8.75 billion worth of contracts, most of which were
awarded noncompetitively. Only 60 percent of the city has electricity. Half
of the hospitals and three-quarters of the child-care centers remain closed.
Violent crime is on the rise. Less than half of the population has returned.
How do you pretty up this picture? As an opening act, Mr. Bush met on
Wednesday with Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who with much publicity
drove a "replica" of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington to seek
an audience with the president. No Cindy Sheehan bum's rush for him. Mr.
Bush granted his wish and paraded him before the press. That was enough to
distract the visitor from his professed message to dramatize the unfinished
job on the Gulf. Instead Mr. Vaccarella effusively thanked the president for
"the millions of FEMA trailers" complete with air-conditioning and TV. "You
know, I wish you had another four years, man," he said. "If we had this
president for another four years, I think we'd be great."
The CNN White House correspondent, Ed Henry, loved it. "Hollywood
couldn't have scripted this any better, a gritty guy named Rockey slugging
it out, trying to realize his dream and getting that dream realized against
all odds," he said. He didn't ask how this particular Rockey, a fast-food
manager who lost everything a year ago, financed this mission or so
effortlessly pulled it off. It was up to bloggers and Democrats to report
shortly thereafter that Mr. Vaccarella had run as a Republican candidate for
the St. Bernard Parish commission in 1999. It was up to Iris Hageney of
Gretna, La., to complain on the Times-Picayune Web site that the episode was
"a huge embarrassment" that would encourage Americans to "forget the
numerous people who still don't have trailers or at least one with
electricity or water."
That is certainly the White House game plan as it looks toward the
president's two-day return to the scene of the crime. Just as it brought
huge generators to floodlight Mr. Bush's prime-time recovery speech in
Jackson Square a year ago - and then yanked the plug as soon as he was
done - so it will stop at little to bathe this anniversary in the rosiest
possible glow.
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the
best-selling account of Katrina, "The Great Deluge," is worried that even
now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not)
in the Gulf. "I don't think anybody's getting the Bush strategy," he said
when we talked last week. "The crucial point is that the inaction is
deliberate - the inaction is the action." As he sees it, the administration,
tacitly abetted by New Orleans's opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is
encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees
("Only Band-Aids have been put on them"), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth
Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city,
with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed.
"Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains," Mr. Brinkley
says incredulously. "The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a
red state."
Perhaps. But with no plan for salvaging either of the catastrophes on
his watch, this president can no sooner recover his credibility by putting
on an elaborate show of sermonizing and spin this week than Mr. Cruise could
levitate his image by jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. While the White
House's latest screenplay may have been conceived as "Mission Accomplished
II," what we're likely to see play out in New Orleans won't even be a patch
on "Mission: Impossible III."
© 2006 The New York Times
###
Yet Bush's blank checks flow into Jeb's Floriduh everytime the wind
blows. Talk about a criminal act.
.
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