| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
30 Aug 2006 09:16:17 AM |
| Object: |
Georgie's photo-op adventures in a destroyed and neglected American city |
From The New York Times, 8/30/06:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/opinion/30dowd.html
Begat, Bothered, Bewildered
By Maureen Dowd.
Doing his stations of the Katrina cross, President Bush went for
breakfast with Mayor Ray Nagin at Betsy’s Pancake House.
As Mr. Bush tried to squeeze past some tightly placed tables, a
waitress, Joyce Labruzzo, teased him, saying, "Mr. President, are you
going to turn your back on me?’’
"No ma’am,’’ he replied, with a laugh and a pause for effect.
"Not again."
It was a rare unguarded moment -- showing that his towering Katrina
failure is lodged somewhere in the front of his cerebral cortex -- in
a trip of staged, studiously happy settings, steering away from the
wreckage of buildings and people so searing for anyone who loved the
saucy and sauce-laden New Orleans of old.
W.’s anniversary contrition for the cameras was a more elaborate
version of his famous Air Force One flyover a year ago, when he had to
be shown a DVD of angry news coverage of apartheid suffering here
before he belatedly and grudgingly broke off his five-week Crawford
vacation.
In an interview on the Upper Ninth Ward’s desolate North Dorgenois
Street, the president told NBC’s Brian Williams that, besides Camus,
he had recently read a book on the Battle of New Orleans and "three
Shakespeares."
A White House aide said one of them was "Hamlet."
What could be more fitting?
A prince who dithers instead of acting and then acts precipitously at
the wrong moment, not paying attention when someone vulnerable drowns.
The president bristled when the anchor asked about criticism that his
inept response had to do with a "patrician upbringing" and about
whether he was asking the country to sacrifice enough.
"Americans are sacrificing," he said.
"We pay a lot of taxes."
The last two days in Mississippi and New Orleans were W.’s play within
the play.
He took the role of the empathetic and engaged chief executive,
rallying resources to save the Gulf Coast, even as the larger lens
showed a sad picture of American communities that are still decrepit
and hurting, while the Bush administration’s billions flow to
reconstructing -- or rather not reconstructing -- Iraq.
You longed for this Crawford Hamlet to just go out there and say,
"This just isn’t good enough."
Instead, he gritted his teeth and put on his blandly optimistic
cheerleader-in-chief role and talked about restoring "the soul’’ of
New Orleans.
It always makes me nervous when W. does soul talk.
He was brazen enough to pose as the man of action even in a city
ruined by his initial and continuing inaction.
"I’ve been on the levees,’’ he told a crowd at a high school here
yesterday.
"I’ve seen these good folks working.’’
He spoke to a small number of residents in the boiling sun before the
one house that had been tidily restored in a blighted neighborhood in
Biloxi.
Outside the TV frame, there was a toilet on its side in the yard of a
gutted house.
On one fence spoke there was a child’s abandoned stuffed toy.
At a stop at a building company in Gulfport, Miss., he chirped
biblically:
"There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered. Houses will
begat jobs, jobs will begat houses."
Douglas Brinkley, the New Orleans writer who recounted the history of
the trellis of failure, Republican and Democratic, federal, state and
local, in "The Great Deluge,’’ noted that Mr. Bush was merely
"sweating bullets trying to get the visit over with."
"In the Republican playbook, Katrina’s a loser,’’ he said.
Mr. Bush tells journalists he has been reading prodigiously, 53 books
so far this year, with three bios of George Washington, two of Lincoln
and one of Mao.
He seems more attuned to his place in history and yet he doesn’t
really seem to get that his presidency will be defined by rushing into
one place too fast and not rushing into another fast enough.
He has let ***** Cheney and Rummy launch Category 5 attacks on critics
of the war.
Darth Vader reiterated his nutty pre-emption policy, and Rummy
compared critics of Iraq to Chamberlains who appeased Hitler, noting
that "once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the
rising threat of a new type of fascism."
Somebody needs to corner the defense chief and explain that it’s not
that we don’t want to fight terrorism, it’s that we want to do it
efficiently and effectively.
Why is it necessary to scare the country, make false connections
between an ill-conceived war and fighting terror, and demonize critics
with outrageously careless historical references to Hitler and
fascism?
_____________________________________________________
Georgie gives his one-finger victory salute
http://www.devilducky.com/media/21502/
Harry
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Georgie's photo-op adventures in a destroyed and neglected American city |
30 Aug 2006 09:29:58 AM |
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Harry Hope wrote:
From The New York Times, 8/30/06:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/opinion/30dowd.html
Begat, Bothered, Bewildered
By Maureen Dowd.
In an interview on the Upper Ninth Ward's desolate North Dorgenois
Street, the president told NBC's Brian Williams that, besides Camus,
he had recently read a book on the Battle of New Orleans and "three
Shakespeares."
A White House aide said one of them was "Hamlet."
What could be more fitting?
A prince who dithers instead of acting and then acts precipitously at
the wrong moment, not paying attention when someone vulnerable drowns.
I don't know if Maureen Dowd should follow this analogy
too closely, since the "vulnerable person" who drowned
in Hamlet drowned because she was insane and did
something stupid.
--
Walt Smith
Firelock on DALNet
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