The Katrina Administration
John Kerry recently delivered a speech at Brown University including the following basic indictment of incompetence in the Bush Administration that I wish I'd written:
Katrina is a symbol of all this administration does and doesn't do. Michael Brown — or Brownie as the President so famously thanked him for doing a heck of a job — Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence; what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad; what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy; what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning; what Tom Delay is to ethics; and what George Bush is to "Mission Accomplished" and "Wanted Dead or Alive."I remember having an IM conversation before the election with a Bush supporter who will remain unnamed (unless he wants to speak up), and my argument for Kerry over Bush eventually boiled down to (and I believe was expressed in precisely these words): "Bush makes really bad decisions."[The administration] has consistently squandered time, tax dollars, political capital, and even risked American lives on sideshow adventures: A war of choice in Iraq against someone who had nothing to do with 9/11; a full scale presidential assault on Social Security when everyone knows the real crisis is in health care — Medicare and Medicaid. And that's before you get to willful denial on global warming; avoidance on competitiveness; complicity in the loss and refusal of health care to millions.
Maybe if I just ignore him, he'll eventually go away.
Comments
Didn't we create a Department of Homeland Security to deal with national emergencies quickly? Brownie should have been taking orders from Chertoff, but he was too stupid to realize that he was set up to take the fall.
Do the Republicans want FEMA to fail because Carter established it? Who can say anymore. It's getting pretty Hitler's Bunker over at the GOP -the whole thing's unraveling, the end is near, and people are going crazy and commiting suicide.
Then again, I couldn't believe people actually voted for a second term of this.
And still: None of this helps those poor bastard they're fishing out of the water.
If you ignore George Bush, he will in fact go away. January 2009.
I would like to point out a John Edwards speech, apparently made on the same day as the Kerry speech. See http://www.oneamericacommittee.com/20050919.asp.
I find the comments of Mr. Edwards much more attractive than those of Mr. Kerry. I agree with Mr. Tidball that the Kerry speech is a better indictment of the Bush administration. The Edwards speech, in my opinion, offers a better statement of where we could go from here.
You're right, that's a great speech, Steve. I really like Edwards; we'd be fabulously lucky to see a quarter of the things he proposes become reality.