[Mb-civic] Baltimore Sun calls for Bush Ouster!

[Ian]

Subject: Baltimore Sun calls for Bush Ouster
 

After Katrina fiasco, time for Bush to go

 

     By Gordon Adams

 

September 8, 2005

 

WASHINGTON - The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of

incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blunders that should lead to

serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in

office.

 

When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a

year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the

Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad

daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.

 

When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut

by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public

responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that

the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone

is playing politics with the public trust.

 

When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in

northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the

government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the

assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the

administration to leave town.

 

When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two

days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are

starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.

 

When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at

the New Orleans convention center - where people died and were starving -

and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they

should be fired, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael

Brown in New Orleans last week.

 

When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the

levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National

Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing

precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane

Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.

 

When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of

people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both

money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to

commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given

his walking papers.

 

When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the

poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of

housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity

that should banish him from office.

 

When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame

response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local

officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays

the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself

accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq,

Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their

own misjudgments.

 

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and

narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist

crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials

who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of

government with expensive baloney.

 

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of

bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every

way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with

Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was

"small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from

this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer

profiteering behind it.

 

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital

Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their

strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and

mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.

 

Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of

International Affairs at George Washington University, was senior White

House budget official for national security in the Clinton administration.

 

Copyright C 2005, The Baltimore Sun |

 

 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050911/9eee8d70/attachment-0001.htm