Bush Asks New Orleans: "What Didn't Go Right?"
Bush's handlers are eager to show that their boy is not “out of touch.” This becomes more difficult daily, as it becomes apparent that the handlers are also out of touch. The raft of stories coming out of New Orleans shows that FEMA and the Dept of “Homeland Security” are completely out of their element when dealing with a job that demands pasting your ass to a chair, sitting at a desk, and manning the phone lines to direct an enormous logistical effort.
On the issue of the top dingleberry being out of touch, I guess it's a matter of “like mother, like son.” For real, orbital, out-of-touchness, Barbara Bush can't be beat — listen to the sound clip of her below, expressing the opinion that the evacuees are really quite fortunate to be flooded out of house and home, have their relatives drowned, and be treated like drowning rats — better off in the drink. But her son the president is not far behind, as Nancy Pelosi made clear when she reported his delivery of an amazing Bushism, as reported in the Houston Chronicle quote below.
[quote=Houston Chronicle]At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”
She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.
He said, “Why would I do that?” Pelosi said.
I said, “Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.”
And he said “What didn't go right?” [/quote]
You can play a very short video of Nancy Pelosi relating Bush's statement using Winamp. There are many other Katrina-related videos at Katrina Little Movies (You have to sign up to join this website, but it is really worth it for all of the incredible material there.)
The reason this boondoggle is going to blow up in Bush's face is simply because it is so damned obvious that no only do they not give a flying fuck about New Orleans or its people — they also view this as an opportunity to prove that you can, in fact, fool all of the voters all of the time. The media has spun this story six different ways from Sunday, but regardless of the spin, the atrocity of contemptful neglect that Bush has demonstrated toward the injured Southerners should chap hides all across America. With Senator Mary Landrieu threatening to punch Bush's lights out if he criticizes Louisiana authorities one more time, Bush could be in for the celebrity death match of his his life.
Pride cometh before the fall, and certainly pride has been the Ace up Bush's sleeve in one surprising deal after another. This time, though, being out of touch can be terminal, as when he joked that New Orleans would rise again and become a place where rich kids can “have too much fun.” Yes, and all of the manicured lawns and beautiful golf courses will be restored, and then he'll come back.
I have often thought to myself, “What will Bush's Falklands be?” You'll remember that it was the misbegotten adventurism of an Argentine junta at its wits end for further distractions that led to its destruction. The future history might read like this:
[quote="Encyclopedia Liberalica“]”By September 2005, Bush had destroyed the nation's financial solvency, declared war on Islam internationally, sent the entire National Guard to depose Iraq's government, alienated the European nations by feeding the fires of international warfare, invited a trade war with Canada over softwood, and directed his proxy Pat Robertson to announce a jihad against Venezuela. Then G-d decided to open yet another front in the worldwide conflict, and directed his armies of wind and waves to destroy the entire Biloxi staging base for the Iraq war, to destroy New Orleans in one day, to create a huge demand for the absent National Guard, to choke off the nation's supply of crude and refined oil by devastating Louisiana and Mississipp, and killed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, all in just over a week. G-d also saw fit to assure the destruction of the Bush junta by hardening the hearts of the Pharaoh's men, so that their TV messages were not at all reassuring, and their sound bites were like stones, and broke the teeth of viewers who sought to consume them. So a great wave of anger rose up in the hearts of the people, and like a tsunami of rage, destroyed the Bush junta."[/quote]
I mean, I like Matt's article, but the idea that FOX is gonna come to Jesus over this issue is quite fanciful. They'll be blasting away at Cindy Sheehan, and supporting Pat Robertson, and hefting the Grand Inquisitor Gonzales into his Supreme Court seat in short order.
Matt has other fantasies, like how there'll be so many new Louisiana voters in Texas after this exodus from Louisiana, but I hate to tell you, after they register in Texas, they're all going to turn out to be felons!
Matt believes that the Bush administration's true colors have been revealedj, and that is going to rock the corporate kleptocracy to its foundations. That is all too optimistic. Right, and the supply of suckers being born every minute has recently been reduced to a trickle. I think not. People remain as stupid as ever, and if the worst fears of the Libertarians take shape, and large internment camps are set up to hold the evacuees under military guard like the INS interned the Haitian boat people for years, who will stop that? The media hasn't even rebelled over the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib.
Now that the civil rights violations are happening here on home turf, it will take tremendous intelligence and dedication for the nation to use this opportunity to unseat the hegemonic forces that have settled astride the people of the nation. Halliburton has already got its snout into the feedbag for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and ultimately we are going to see a land grab so big it will make the theft of California from Mexico, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and the Louisiana Purchase itself, seem like small change. Trump is already waiting to start firing people. This will be reality TV like you never imagined.
[quote="Matt Wells“]Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?
BBC News, Los Angeles
As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.
But unlike Watergate, ”Katrinagate“ was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.
Instead of secretive ”Deep Throat“ meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.
Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.
National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.
They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.
Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.
It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.
'Lies or ignorance'
But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.
The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.
This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the ”mainstream liberal media elite“.
But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.
On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.
As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.
And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.
Iraq concern
When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing ”a heck of a job“ and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.
The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.
It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury.
And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.
The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.
He and others are calling the debacle the ”anti 9-11“: ”The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled,“ he wrote on Sunday.
”Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.“
Media emboldened
It is way too early to tell whether this really will become ”Katrinagate“ for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.
Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.
Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.
Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region
Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively.
The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.
People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.
Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.
Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.
The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: ”We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.
“Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4214516.stm
Published: 2005/09/05 16:48:01 GMT[/quote]
© BBC MMV
On the issue of the top dingleberry being out of touch, I guess it's a matter of “like mother, like son.” For real, orbital, out-of-touchness, Barbara Bush can't be beat — listen to the sound clip of her below, expressing the opinion that the evacuees are really quite fortunate to be flooded out of house and home, have their relatives drowned, and be treated like drowning rats — better off in the drink. But her son the president is not far behind, as Nancy Pelosi made clear when she reported his delivery of an amazing Bushism, as reported in the Houston Chronicle quote below.
[quote=Houston Chronicle]At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”
She related that she urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Brown.
He said, “Why would I do that?” Pelosi said.
I said, “Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.”
And he said “What didn't go right?” [/quote]
You can play a very short video of Nancy Pelosi relating Bush's statement using Winamp. There are many other Katrina-related videos at Katrina Little Movies (You have to sign up to join this website, but it is really worth it for all of the incredible material there.)
The reason this boondoggle is going to blow up in Bush's face is simply because it is so damned obvious that no only do they not give a flying fuck about New Orleans or its people — they also view this as an opportunity to prove that you can, in fact, fool all of the voters all of the time. The media has spun this story six different ways from Sunday, but regardless of the spin, the atrocity of contemptful neglect that Bush has demonstrated toward the injured Southerners should chap hides all across America. With Senator Mary Landrieu threatening to punch Bush's lights out if he criticizes Louisiana authorities one more time, Bush could be in for the celebrity death match of his his life.
Pride cometh before the fall, and certainly pride has been the Ace up Bush's sleeve in one surprising deal after another. This time, though, being out of touch can be terminal, as when he joked that New Orleans would rise again and become a place where rich kids can “have too much fun.” Yes, and all of the manicured lawns and beautiful golf courses will be restored, and then he'll come back.
I have often thought to myself, “What will Bush's Falklands be?” You'll remember that it was the misbegotten adventurism of an Argentine junta at its wits end for further distractions that led to its destruction. The future history might read like this:
[quote="Encyclopedia Liberalica“]”By September 2005, Bush had destroyed the nation's financial solvency, declared war on Islam internationally, sent the entire National Guard to depose Iraq's government, alienated the European nations by feeding the fires of international warfare, invited a trade war with Canada over softwood, and directed his proxy Pat Robertson to announce a jihad against Venezuela. Then G-d decided to open yet another front in the worldwide conflict, and directed his armies of wind and waves to destroy the entire Biloxi staging base for the Iraq war, to destroy New Orleans in one day, to create a huge demand for the absent National Guard, to choke off the nation's supply of crude and refined oil by devastating Louisiana and Mississipp, and killed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, all in just over a week. G-d also saw fit to assure the destruction of the Bush junta by hardening the hearts of the Pharaoh's men, so that their TV messages were not at all reassuring, and their sound bites were like stones, and broke the teeth of viewers who sought to consume them. So a great wave of anger rose up in the hearts of the people, and like a tsunami of rage, destroyed the Bush junta."[/quote]
» Click here to download Nancy Pelosi Speaks.wmv.
» Click here to download barbarabush.mp3.
Matt Wells' BBC Op-Ed Piece Is A Little Too Sanguine 4 Me
Matt Wells, of the BBC, has his own optimistic take on the media situation, in the article quoted below. He thinks the media is going to redeem itself by getting a grain of social conscience and learning to talk back to the Bush spin machine. Somehow I doubt it. Rove and his double-dealers will be calling in every favor, threatening every troublesome newsperson with exposure for small or large crimes, endangering their jobs, grabbing short hairs and whispering soft threats. Soon the media will remember its place.I mean, I like Matt's article, but the idea that FOX is gonna come to Jesus over this issue is quite fanciful. They'll be blasting away at Cindy Sheehan, and supporting Pat Robertson, and hefting the Grand Inquisitor Gonzales into his Supreme Court seat in short order.
Matt has other fantasies, like how there'll be so many new Louisiana voters in Texas after this exodus from Louisiana, but I hate to tell you, after they register in Texas, they're all going to turn out to be felons!
Matt believes that the Bush administration's true colors have been revealedj, and that is going to rock the corporate kleptocracy to its foundations. That is all too optimistic. Right, and the supply of suckers being born every minute has recently been reduced to a trickle. I think not. People remain as stupid as ever, and if the worst fears of the Libertarians take shape, and large internment camps are set up to hold the evacuees under military guard like the INS interned the Haitian boat people for years, who will stop that? The media hasn't even rebelled over the mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib.
Now that the civil rights violations are happening here on home turf, it will take tremendous intelligence and dedication for the nation to use this opportunity to unseat the hegemonic forces that have settled astride the people of the nation. Halliburton has already got its snout into the feedbag for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, and ultimately we are going to see a land grab so big it will make the theft of California from Mexico, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and the Louisiana Purchase itself, seem like small change. Trump is already waiting to start firing people. This will be reality TV like you never imagined.
[quote="Matt Wells“]Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?
BBC News, Los Angeles
As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.
But unlike Watergate, ”Katrinagate“ was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.
Instead of secretive ”Deep Throat“ meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.
Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.
National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.
They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.
Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.
It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.
'Lies or ignorance'
But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.
The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.
This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the ”mainstream liberal media elite“.
But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.
On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.
As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.
And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.
Iraq concern
When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing ”a heck of a job“ and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.
The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.
It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury.
And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.
The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.
He and others are calling the debacle the ”anti 9-11“: ”The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled,“ he wrote on Sunday.
”Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield.“
Media emboldened
It is way too early to tell whether this really will become ”Katrinagate“ for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.
Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.
Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.
Black America will not forget the government failures, and nor will the Gulf Coast region
Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively.
The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.
People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.
Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.
Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.
The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: ”We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.
“Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4214516.stm
Published: 2005/09/05 16:48:01 GMT[/quote]
© BBC MMV