President Bush has made his last official appearance before the American public and is now ready to hightail it out of town. I have watched several speeches and interviews he has given over the past week or so and marveled at the distorted reality he leaves as the legacy of his administration. For instance, in his final press conference on the 12th, he speculated about what he could have done to improve the Katrina situation. He toyed with the idea of landing Air Force One but decided against it because it would have necessitated using personnel who would be drawn away from the rescue effort to "take care of me." That just struck me as such a strange response. Who would possibly think that landing Air Force One near New Orleans would have helped anyone or anything? Did it even occur to him that it needn't have happened in the first place?
The world knew that New Orleans couldn't survive a category 3 storm, much less a category 5, because the levees wouldn't hold. I remember reading an article in "The New Yorker" in the early 90's about this very subject. It described how New Orleans is a bowl and when it fills with water, the water has nowhere to go. This was not a secret. It would flood and create unimaginable destruction. But the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration in Washington, D.C., had substantially cut funding for the repair of the levee system only a few months before Katrina hit.
And how odd was it that he was "disappointed" not to find WMD in Iraq to justify his war on that country. Disappointed? What kind of word was that to use? If Saddam Hussein had possessed WMD, the threat to the world would have been terrifying. But, according to Bush, preferable to no WMD.
As to the claim that he has kept the country safe since 9/11, why did 9/11 happen in the first place? "The 9/11 Commission Report" says this: ...domestic agencies did not know what to do and no one gave them direction...the terrorists exploited deep institutional failings within our government.
Deep institutional failings seems to be the watch phrase of the Bush Administration. So. . .say "Goodnight" Bush.
3 comments:
Meredith, I LOVE this post. I can't agree with you more!
This is FABULOUS! I read Goodnight Moon quite often to my son, I must say though, this version is much better! ;)
this is brilliant! Thanks for stopping by the Urbanity blog so I could find you and your blog. It's wonderful and intelligent and totally jives with my personal beliefs, which is always nice because it validates how smart people like we are. kidding. Kind of.
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