Politics

On Meet the Press – Aaron Brousard, President of Jackson Parrish, Louisiana.
At the end of the video, when he starts talking about city employees who have worked hard to repair the levees and provide emergency services, he begins talking about the man who is keeping the building he’s in running. The man’s mother was in an nursing home and was desparate for help. She called Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights to ask for help, and Friday night she drowned in her nursing home.
“They’ve had press conferences; I’m sick of press conferences. For God’s sake, shut up and send us somebody!”
“Bureaucracy has committed murder in the Greater New Orleans area.”

from U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., yesterday afternoon:

“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.
“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

It’s not about politics, it’s about the fact that people are dying because you’re a dumbfuck. From the New York Times on the “politics.”

White House officials, already sensitive that Mr. Bush is suffering the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and under pressure to manage a catastrophe of what they called biblical proportions, reacted with frustration.
“Seventy-two hours into this, to be openly posturing about this, to be attacking the president, is not only despicable and wrong, it’s not politically smart,” said one White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as talking about the crisis in political terms. “Normal people at home understand that it’s not the president who’s responsible for this, it’s the hurricane. This will get better, hour by hour and day by day.”

Not politically smart? Nice warning, asshole. It’s not the hurricane. It’s the totally lack of help from the federal government AFTER the hurricane. People aren’t dying because of the storm; they survived the storm. They’re dying because they’re not receiving disaster aid, and that is Bush’s fault.
And Americablog has a really good point — If we can find who to blame, we can fix the problem of why people aren’t getting aid by doing it differently. It’s not about trashing people, it’s about getting useless people to do something different, or at least get the hell out of the way.

Americablog notes that Fox News is pushing a new talking point, in the quote by FEMA director Michael Brown:

Brown of FEMA: We work closely with the state government. The federal government didn not just come in here and tell the state governor how or what to do. We came in here and said, ‘What do you want us to do? We will help you.’ We are now taking it upon ourselves to do what we think needs to be done. And we will continue to do that.
Translation: LA’s Democratic governnor screwed things up royally and now we’re cleaning up her mess and taking charge.

Louisiana’s disaster planning funds were relocated by the president to fund Iraq and for your tax cuts.
New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers federal funding was cut by $71.2 million in June.
Mississippi and Louisiana National Guard troops are not available to help flood relief because they are serving in Iraq.

I try not to cut and paste other people’s writing wholesale into my blog, because I think my blog should be my writing, not other peoples. But I have done it recently, and I’m doing it again today, because there’s a lot of information in a recent post from Americablog that’s worth thinking about:

A lot of things have annoyed me about the coverage of Pat Robertson’s latest unChristian, unAmerican and unbelievable broadside — this one calling for the assassination of Venezuela’s leader. First, as Jon Stewart so nimbly demonstrated, Robertson is an esteemed, beloved figure on the Republican side. They use him to raise money and get votes and generally treat him like a major figure. He is NOT the wacky uncle that everyone ignores. And when Robertson tosses off one of these vicious and wacky comments, Bush and most far right “Christian” groups can’t even bring themselves to denounce cold-blooded murder.
But the part that annoyed me the most? Almost none of the coverage made clear that Chavez is the democratically elected leader of his country. Bush encouraged a military coup — which overthrew Chavez’s government — and then gave the thumbs up to the junta that wanted to replace him. Only a stirring demonstration of people power forced the military to back down (much to Bush’s chagrin) and Chavez was put back in place. He’s since won reelection under a vote that was less contested than Bush’s two paths to glory in 2000 and 2004. How can anyone call Chavez a critic of Bush and then fail to point out that Bush encouraged his overthrow? Especially since this proves Bush is lying when he claims to be spreading democracy. You can’t support democracy just when it suits you — as Bush has done his entire presidency.
And yet even middle of the road USA Today referred to Chavez as a “populist strongman.” He is NOT a strongman (whatever you think of his pronouncements or policies). Chavez is the democratically elected leader of Venezuela and sits on one of the world’s largest supplies of oil — and Bush wanted him overthrown. He has every reason to distrust and dislike Bush, as does any Venezuelan who believes in democracy and the sovereign rights of nations to be left alone.

He’s making an excellent point — that democracy doesn’t mean crap to George Bush if the democracy in question doesn’t do what we say, and jump when we say jump. They’re perfectly happy to overthrow democracies. And if they’ll do it to other countries, who’s to say they won’t do it to ours?