Day: September 15, 2005

Hmm…

Did George W. Bush give a speech tonight? It sure looked like him. That guy’s voice in the video I downloaded and watched sure sounded like him.

Who stole my president?

Since 9/11, I’ve become rather confident in my support of George W. Bush. Watching him stand on that mountain of rubble at ground zero with his arm around that fire fighter made me proud to be an American. Hearing his words every time he said we were gonna hunt down the terrorists; “Smoke ’em outta their holes” and all that. And most things since then…including the choice to go to Iraq, and his will to stay there and finish the job. I’ve been with him all the way.

And then Katrina had to come in and suck all the oxygen out of the air.

Before the hurricane, Bush was doing a pretty good job staying ‘on message’. But since August 29th, it’s been one mess after another. I don’t blame Bush directly for any of the crap that went wrong in the relief effort. I do blame some of the people who are around him, and I think George W. could have done a better job in a few instances. FEMA director Michael Brown was a lame-o, and it’s too bad it took Katrina to reveal that to the world. The president should have known Brown was unqualified to do the job. But ever since Bush showed up on the gulf coast September 2nd, I feel like he’s been playing to a certain group of people, and not all Americans.

I did blog the other day about Bush’s “I take responsibility” talk, and I made an attempt at giving him the benefit of the doubt. I still (mostly) believe in what I wrote. But I felt different after I listened to the words in his speech tonight.

Presidents who give away other peoples money have always given me a bad taste in my mouth. And tonight, while watching George W. Bush, that taste showed up.

Five minutes into the telecast, I expected Bush to pull a wad of bills out of his pocket and start running around laughing hysterically, handing the cash to anyone and everyone. I couldn’t hear his words anymore. All I could see was his hand reaching into my wallet. It’s like he drove me to my bank, walked me up to the ATM machine, put my debit card in and started punching in the pin number. Really! I’m thinking…”Hey, how does he know my pin number?” And then he starts emptying my checking AND savings account while I stand there dumbfounded.

Once he started handing out the candy…it seemed as though he just couldn’t stop. The costs for rebuilding could reach $200 billion or beyond. And this is $200 billion ABOVE AND BEYOND the cost of the war.

I don’t begrudge the federal government helping in some ways. Part of being a citizen of the United States means that you help your fellow man. Bush was right when he said this:

“We have also witnessed the kind of desperation no citizen of this great and generous Nation should ever have to know – fellow Americans calling out for food and water … vulnerable people left at the mercy of criminals who had no mercy … and the bodies of the dead lying uncovered and untended in the street.”

That’s why I felt obligated to give a substantial amount of money (for my household) to Katrina relief efforts. Watching my fellow Americans suffer on the streets of New Orleans was heartbreaking. I don’t want to ever see anything like that again.

But I think Bush went overboard in his relief proposals, and I’m worried because the federal government doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to making sure our tax dollars end up where they’re needed most. All I can see are a bunch of smiling members of Congress looking on as Bush signs the big legislation check. You’ll think they’re smiling because they’re able to help victims of Katrina, but they’re really smiling because the bill being signed also contains a healthy dose of pork for unnecessary programs in their home state.

In the long run, will this huge federal relief package really help improve the lives of people, or will it just extend a life of poverty? Most of the welfare recipients I’ve known have been more than happy to stay welfare recipients. With this speech tonight, Bush has all but guaranteed the free-loaders another decade of dependence on the teat of America. 

Congress already approved $62 billion dollars — mostly to cover costs already incurred. Housing vouchers: $3.5 billion. Special tax cuts: $5 billion. And it doesn’t stop there.

Where is the sanity; the fiscal sanity which is critical at this moment? It’s obvious we’re not going to get it from a president who has suddenly gone money crazy. Ahem, WE’RE STILL FIGHTING A WAR that’s not going to end tomorrow. Another Pentagon supplement is right around the corner.

Shouldn’t some of the financial responsibility be with the people of Louisiana? I gave the amount of money I could give to the charity I trusted the most. Now, I’m being forced to give more money to a spending addicted federal government. 

I hate asking this question, but does Bush really know what he’s getting into? This bill will take generations to pay off if someone doesn’t splash some cold water on this man and the Congress. I fear that there has never been a time where there is more total spending and more wasteful spending in Washington than we have today. If my president won’t limit the amount of tax dollars bleeding out of my hard earned paycheck, who will?

And before you accuse me of the big switch…forget it. I don’t believe for a second that a Democrat could behave any differently than Bush at this moment. The disease isn’t partisan.

Katrina will end up breaking more than physical things. Our governments fix for Katrina will break the bank for my kids, and their kids, and their kids’ kids.

And I’m worried about that. You should be worried too.

UPDATE: Another Read My Lips moment?

I was out of the house and couldn’t watch Bush’s speech. Before I read about it, read about what the media thought of it, read about what people blogged about it, and read the comments on the blogs from people who wrote about it, I need to watch it.

I downloaded a video of the speech from the Political Teen.

Thoughts and comments on the way.

UPDATE: Yikes.

77 year-old song-writer adds his two bits to the “blame the president for Katrina” pile.

Singer/song-writer BURT BACHARACH has attacked US President GEORGE W BUSH for his handling of the Hurricane Katrina rescue operation.

The WALK ON BY star insists America had adequate warning of the horrific disaster which rocked Louisiana and left New Orleans submerged, and yet Bush continued to fund the war against terror instead of protecting his people.

Bacharach, 77, recalls reading newspaper articles months before the hurricane, warning “that (New Orleans) would be engulfed, that people would drown, that bodies would be floating down the road.

“Instead of pushing the funding up, they took most of it away to fight this stupid war, and that’s unforgivable.

“I think Bush is just about the poorest president we’ve ever had. You’d have to go back before I was born to find a worse one.”

Wow, that’s front page news. And for goodness’ sake, Dionne Warwick made “Walk On By” famous. No one cares about the writer of the song. She sang it. She’s the star, OK?

I can hear the staffers at the White House right now…

STAFFER: “Uh, Mr. President? As you know, lots of famous people have made statements about the lack of an expedient response to Hurricane Katrina. Politicians too, from the right and left side of the isle. Well, we thought you might want to know about the latest statement. It’s serious sir. Please, you might want to sit down. Mr. President, Burt Bacharach has gone public with his thoughts.”

BUSH: “Oh no, not Burt! If I’ve lost Bacharach, I’ve lost the country.”

PFFT!

That’s what it cost me to fill up my Toyota Pickup this morning. It used to be that I could barely fit $13 worth of gas in the tank. Not anymore. Today? $32. Ouch.

So, I get to looking at what this guy is doing and I’m ready to buy a car with his engine NOW.

Yep, it’s what you’re thinking. Vegetable oil. The car runs on VEGETABLE OIL! He’s got a freakin bottle of Wesson and he’s filling his tank up. Cool!

Oh, wait a minute, that’s not Wesson…the kind you need costs $3.50 per gallon.

What kind of stupid idiot is this guy? What a dumb idea! I get to fill my tank up with vegetable oil so the interior of my car smells like the theatre lobby at the cinemaplex AND I get to pay more per gallon than I do at my local Shell station?

Nevermind. Go back to your lives, citizens.

That’s what Michael Brown, the former FEMA director told his boss Michael Chertoff, on August 29th as the severity of Katrina became clear. According to Brown, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an “out of control” situation.

“I can’t get a unified command established.”

One day later, Brown asked the White House to take control of the response effort.

He said he felt the subsequent appointment of Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré of the Army as the Pentagon’s commander of active-duty forces began to turn the situation around.

In his first interview since being fired as FEMA director, Brown focused most of his criticism at Blanco.

Governor Blanco said Wednesday that she took responsibility for failures and missteps in the immediate response to the hurricane and pledged a united effort to rebuild areas ravaged by the storm, adding, “at the state level, we must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again.” A spokesman for Ms. Blanco denied Mr. Brown’s description of disarray in Louisiana’s emergency response operation. “That is just totally inaccurate,” said Bob Mann, the governor’s communications director. “Everything that Mr. Brown needed in terms of resources or information from the state, he had those available to him.”

As Mr. Brown recounted it, the weekend before New Orleans’s levees burst, FEMA sent an emergency response team of 10 or 20 people to Louisiana to review evacuation plans with local officials.

By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early on Sunday, Mr. Brown said he grew so frustrated with the failure of local authorities to make the evacuation mandatory that he asked Mr. Bush for help.

“Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?” Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.

“Mike, you want me to call the mayor?” the president responded in surprise, Mr. Brown said. Moments later, apparently on his own, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, held a news conference to announce a mandatory evacuation, but it was too late, Mr. Brown said. Plans said it would take at least 72 hours to get everyone out.

He said, she said, they said, he said again, she said again…

Given what we know about Mike Brown and his ability to fabricate, I have to suspect that a lot of this is about covering himself from the flak that will eventually fly.

There’s going to be a whole lot of this finger pointing/blame stuff going on now that the recovery effort is winding down and rebuilding is ramping up. My hope is that a commission is established to investigate what when wrong and when it went wrong. The group should not include any active or inactive politicians though. The investigation would be a repeat of the 9/11 Commission findings, which ended up tainted by partisan politics. A Katrina Commission should include retired military generals who won’t have any reason to look at the events through political eyeglasses.

We’ll see.