G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Neck Deep: Drowning Accountability
By Robert Parry
Created Aug 30 2007 - 9:18am
By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
Two years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the great American city
of New Orleans and killed some 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast. With that
tragedy, however, came a belated public awakening about how George W. Bush
had put cronyism, ideology and partisanship ahead of competence, national
unity and accountability.
In this excerpt from te Parrys' new book, Neck Deep [1], that national
turning point is recalled:
On Aug. 27, 2005, as a powerful hurricane named Katrina surged through the
Gulf of Mexico and took aim at New Orleans, most Americans still had
confidence in their government's ability to respond to crises and natural
disasters with efficiency and speed.
The country prided itself on its ability to rescue people in danger, to
dispatch resources, to rebuild after the worst was over.
Many Americans considered the United States unparalleled in its ability to
fly disaster specialists to the far corners of the globe when catastrophe
struck, to oversee the delivery of food, water, medicines and other
necessities. It was part of America's can-do spirit; it was part of the
national self-image.
There was also a belief that technology had gone a long way in taming the
threats of nature, that the types of disasters that had plagued the country
in its earlier days were like yellowed newspaper articles. They were tales
from grandparents, like the stories of World War II or the Great Depression,
mildly interesting but no longer very relevant.
Modern catastrophes - at least as they affected most Americans - were
confined to Hollywood disaster movies with big-budget special effects that
brought the audience right into the middle of the danger but without any
real threat of harm.
That was the frame of reference for many Americans as they concentrated on
the news of Katrina's approach to New Orleans. There was a fascination with
the possibility of danger; there was awareness that many experts warned
about flood waters breaching the levees and inundating the low-lying city;
but there were few expectations that those alarms would prove true or that
serious harm would befall New Orleans.
On another long vacation in Crawford, Texas, President Bush treated the
gathering threat to New Orleans in a similar vein. He responded to the alarm
among government weather experts with little more than cheerleading, praise
for and confidence in the federal, state and local officials on the front
lines.
Like many Americans watching on TV, Bush acted like a spectator expecting
whatever damage did occur would be neatly cleared away and everything would
quickly be put back in order.
Newsmen and network anchors also behaved with more excitement than
trepidation. They flew to New Orleans expecting some dramatic scenes of
themselves in rain gear leaning into the wind to shout live reports into a
microphone. They would bemoan the property damage and some loss of life,
before packing up and flying back to New York or on to another assignment.
But that wasn't how Hurricane Katrina played out. Instead the storm and its
devastation brought a national awakening - or at least the beginning of
one - with large numbers of Americans finally catching on to the gap between
Bush's rhetoric and reality.
Before Katrina, the mix of Bush's folksy charm, the lasting emotions from
9/11 and the powerful right-wing media/political apparatus had kept most
Americans under the President's spell.
In a way, Bush's ability to mesmerize so many people fit with a different
type of thriller movie, one in which a harrowing truth dawns slowly on a
community although the recognition of danger may have come too late.
Ignored Warnings
There had been plenty of warnings about the precarious topographical
situation facing New Orleans, one of the nation's best-known and best-loved
cities, the home of jazz, Cajun cooking and Mardi Gras.
Government experts and journalists knew that a severe hurricane could force
a storm surge that would push the waters of Lake Pontchartrain over the
levees and flood large sections of the city that sat below sea level. New
Orleans was often compared to a saucer that would quickly fill if liquid
began pouring over the edges.
In a report prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Federal Emergency Management
Administration had listed a hurricane inundating New Orleans as one of the
three most likely catastrophes hitting the United States, along with a
terrorist assault on New York City and a San Francisco earthquake.
A series of articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2004 had detailed
the looming threat, which was made worse by budgetary neglect of the sinking
levee system and an incomplete reconstruction.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to
handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price
we pay," said Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be
finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a
security issue for us."
A possible breach of the levees also was a major topic of discussion on news
and weather channels as Katrina churned through the Gulf. Yet, when Katrina
crashed ashore, wreaking devastation along the coasts of Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama, government officials - local, state and federal -
seemed taken aback, at times almost paralyzed.
The flood broke through the levees protecting New Orleans Ninth Ward,
filling block after block with muddy fetid water. Tens of thousands of
residents were trapped; hundreds drowning in their homes; others seeking
refuge in emergency shelters at the Superdome and at the Convention Center.
On Aug. 30, 2005, the Times-Picayune posted a story at its Web site saying
"no one can say they didn't see it coming."
It took a while for the magnitude of the New Orleans disaster to become
clear. The big-name newscasters who had pre-positioned themselves in the
storm's path - the likes of NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's Anderson Cooper -
sounded more shocked at first than horrified.
After the storm passed, they looked out their hotel windows at the strange
sight of city streets covered in water. Then, as the summer heat returned,
the journalists moved out around the city, often by boat, to witness a scene
more befitting the Third World than the world's superpower.
Bloated bodies floated in the water or rotted in the hot sun. Hundreds of
residents, trapped in their homes, frantically tore through attic ceilings
to climb out onto roof tops and to wave their arms for help. Others drowned
in steamy attics as the water kept rising.
The Superdome, which had hosted Super Bowl games and other national sporting
events, quickly became infamous as a scene of unspeakable living conditions
as New Orleans residents sweltered inside amid overflowing toilets and
urine-soaked artificial turf.
The U.S. government along with local and state authorities appeared
powerless to respond quickly. Instead, federal, state and local officials
descended into rounds of acrimonious finger-pointing.
The Katrina crisis also brought to light some of Bush's leadership
weaknesses that had been hidden behind White House P.R. curtains during his
first term.
In a retrospective on the Katrina disaster, Newsweek's Evan Thomas reported
that "it's a standing joke among the President's top aides: who gets to
deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and
snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of
the President of the United States."
On Aug. 30, after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the New Orleans levees, the
White House staff was in full cringe mode. Someone was going to have to tell
Bush that he needed to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days.
Though Bush did agree to return to Washington, he remained in a protective
bubble about how bad the Katrina news really was. Before devoting his
attention to the catastrophe, he fulfilled speaking commitments in San Diego
and Phoenix - even clowning with a gift guitar - before heading back to
Washington.
Since Bush famously shuns reading newspapers or watching the news, his staff
decided that the best way to clue Bush in on how bad things were was to burn
a special DVD with TV footage of the flood so he could watch the DVD on Air
Force One, Newsweek's Thomas reported.
"How this could be - how the President of the United States could have even
less 'situational awareness,' as they say in the military, than the average
American about the worse natural disaster in a century - is one of the more
perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of
heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace," Thomas
wrote.
Progressive Media
The Katrina debacle also represented the first significant test of whether
the marginal inroads that American progressives had made in talk radio and
the Internet would have any measurable effect.
Certainly, pro-Bush right-wing talk radio was doing the best it could to
divert blame from the Bush administration onto New Orleans' black mayor Ray
Nagin, Louisiana's Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco and the mostly black
survivors of New Orleans who had been trapped by the storm.
Some right-wing AM radio talkers said "able-bodied" people who lacked
transportation should simply have walked out of New Orleans. In other words,
if these folks weren't so lazy and stupid, they would have used their own
two feet.
But the idea of trying to out-walk a hurricane with 150-mile-per-hour winds
would seem nutty to anyone who's ever lived through even a milder storm.
Still, the argument gave Bush's base another reason not to blame the
President or his team.
For once, however, there was another side of the story reaching listeners on
the AM dial.
As the seriousness of the Katrina crisis sank in on Aug. 31, Robert Parry
was driving north from Washington to Montreal for a previously scheduled
meeting. He wrote at Consortiumnews.com that "while on the road, I also got
a taste of how valuable progressive talk radio could be for arming American
liberals with facts and for persuading Middle Americans that the nation
needs new leadership.
"As I drove past New York City, I picked up an Air America Radio station
where the hosts explained how Bush's spending in Iraq had diverted money
needed to strengthen New Orleans' levees and how deployment of National
Guard troops in Iraq had undermined the Guard's ability to respond to the
disaster.
"What was even more striking was the anger and passion in the voices of Air
America listeners who called in from all over the country. They were furious
over the national disgrace that was unfolding in New Orleans, as Bush
vacationed in Texas and then responded haltingly to the crisis.
But the radio signal of the New York City station faded as I reached upstate
New York. The only AM talk radio I could get then was the far more pervasive
conservative variety. On those stations, the New Orleans crisis either was
treated as not that big a deal or as something to blame on anybody but
Bush."
Bush Visit
When Bush finally made his belated trip to the Gulf Coast on Sept. 2, the
DVD strategy did not appear to have worked. He still seemed disconnected
from the human tragedy and more interested in suggesting that the
catastrophe was unforeseen.
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Bush told ABC's
Diane Sawyer, although the threat to the levees had been recognized for
years.
As tens of thousands of mostly poor and black citizens endured squalor in
flooded New Orleans, Bush slid into his role of peppy cheerleader and
consoled friends like Sen. Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, who had
lost one of his homes.
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house -
there's going to be a fantastic house," Bush joshed. "And I'm looking
forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush also had some encouraging words for his hapless FEMA director, Michael
Brown. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said.
Before boarding a flight back to Washington, Bush continued to banter amid
the suffering. Playing for laughs, Bush recalled his past hard partying in
New Orleans, which he called "the town where I used to come . to enjoy
myself, occasionally too much."
That night during a televised fundraiser for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye
West veered off script to criticize the media for its perceived bias against
African-Americans and George Bush for his lackadaisical response to the
disaster.
"I hate the way they portray us in the media," West said. "If you see a
black family it says they are looting [but] if you see a white family it
says they are looking for food."
Summing up the President's attitude, West said, "George Bush doesn't care
about black people." The remark sent NBC executives into a panic that led
them to censor West's comments from the show's rebroadcast in the Pacific
time zone.
On Saturday, Sept. 3, driving back toward Washington, Robert Parry reported
that "I reached the New York City area and again tuned in the Air America
station. But I was disappointed to hear only the broadcast of pre-recorded
'best-of' content, some of it predating Hurricane Katrina.
"Air America appeared to lack the resources to dispatch correspondents to
the scene and offer special live weekend coverage of the crisis. I did,
however, find live right-wing talk radio, including more blame being heaped
on the trapped New Orleans residents for not using their feet and walking
out of the city before the hurricane hit."
Cracked Image
For once, however, the right-wing media couldn't dictate the terms of a
national story. Not only had the New Orleans levees broken, but the dams
protecting George W. Bush's image were cracking, too.
This time when Bush fumbled a national crisis, many leading newscasters were
on scene to witness the debacle and other journalists echoed their
first-hand assessments of the chaos and ineptitude.
With New Orleans turned into a giant cesspool - and with bloated remains of
American citizens left for days to rot in the sun - the nation was finally
shaking itself alert and finding the nightmare all too real.
Facing a suddenly critical news media and a sharp decline in poll numbers,
Bush revised his approach to the crisis. He ordered up more trips to the
region; posed with more African-Americans; and vowed a vast rebuilding
project on par with what he promised for Iraq.
But his mother stepped on Bush's new compassion. During a visit to Katrina
evacuees in Houston's Astrodome, former First Lady Barbara Bush expressed
her discomfort over "what I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all
want to stay in Texas. .
"So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway, so this - this (she chuckles) is working very well for them."
Bush, the ersatz populist, looked like a phony to many Americans when he
gave a nationally televised speech in shirt sleeves in New Orleans' Jackson
Square with special generators and lighting that had been flown in to give
him a dramatic backdrop.
"We will do what it takes; we will stay as long as it takes," Bush declared
on Sept. 15 in phrasing reminiscent of his pledges about Iraq.
But many prominent figures in the mainstream U.S. news media weren't buying
Bush's P.R. offensive this time. New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote
that the Katrina disaster had exposed, once and for all, Bush's incompetence
and phoniness.
"Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard
again," Rich wrote. "He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil
salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American
psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked
George W. Bush.
"The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this President
because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant
cronyism, the empty sloganeering of 'compassionate conservatism,' the lack
of concern for the 'underprivileged' his mother condescended to at the
Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations
except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to
substitute for action."
Political moderates also were having second thoughts. Times columnist Thomas
L. Friedman, who supported the Iraq War and other parts of Bush's foreign
policy, concluded that Katrina had left Bush's ship of state adrift.
Friedman wrote: "Katrina deprived the Bush team of the energy source that
propelled it forward for the last four years: 9/11 and the halo over the
presidency that came with it. The events of 9/11 created a deference in the
U.S. public, and media, for the administration, which exploited it to the
hilt to push an uncompassionate conservative agenda on tax cuts and runaway
spending, on which it never could have gotten elected. That deference is
over."
"There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch
feign being in touch," observed another New York Times columnist, Maureen
Dowd. "On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he
took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he
had spent some 'quality time' at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered
about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the 'can-do
spirit.'
"'We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job,'
he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Mississippi. . The more the President
echoes his dad's 'Message: I care,' the more the world hears 'Message: I
can't.'"
But the overriding question remained: Did this American awakening arrive too
late? Was there still time to stop Bush and his allies from consolidating
their political control over the federal government?
(Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush is available both at
the publisher's Web site, http://www.neckdeepbook.com [2], and at Amazon.com
[3]. If you buy the book through the publisher's Web site, $5 will be
rebated to Consortiumnews.com to help defray the costs of the site's
original news articles and investigative journalism.)
_______
About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com [4]. It's also available at Amazon.com [5], as is
his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News [6]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Robert Parry
Created Aug 30 2007 - 9:18am
By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
Two years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the great American city
of New Orleans and killed some 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast. With that
tragedy, however, came a belated public awakening about how George W. Bush
had put cronyism, ideology and partisanship ahead of competence, national
unity and accountability.
In this excerpt from te Parrys' new book, Neck Deep [1], that national
turning point is recalled:
On Aug. 27, 2005, as a powerful hurricane named Katrina surged through the
Gulf of Mexico and took aim at New Orleans, most Americans still had
confidence in their government's ability to respond to crises and natural
disasters with efficiency and speed.
The country prided itself on its ability to rescue people in danger, to
dispatch resources, to rebuild after the worst was over.
Many Americans considered the United States unparalleled in its ability to
fly disaster specialists to the far corners of the globe when catastrophe
struck, to oversee the delivery of food, water, medicines and other
necessities. It was part of America's can-do spirit; it was part of the
national self-image.
There was also a belief that technology had gone a long way in taming the
threats of nature, that the types of disasters that had plagued the country
in its earlier days were like yellowed newspaper articles. They were tales
from grandparents, like the stories of World War II or the Great Depression,
mildly interesting but no longer very relevant.
Modern catastrophes - at least as they affected most Americans - were
confined to Hollywood disaster movies with big-budget special effects that
brought the audience right into the middle of the danger but without any
real threat of harm.
That was the frame of reference for many Americans as they concentrated on
the news of Katrina's approach to New Orleans. There was a fascination with
the possibility of danger; there was awareness that many experts warned
about flood waters breaching the levees and inundating the low-lying city;
but there were few expectations that those alarms would prove true or that
serious harm would befall New Orleans.
On another long vacation in Crawford, Texas, President Bush treated the
gathering threat to New Orleans in a similar vein. He responded to the alarm
among government weather experts with little more than cheerleading, praise
for and confidence in the federal, state and local officials on the front
lines.
Like many Americans watching on TV, Bush acted like a spectator expecting
whatever damage did occur would be neatly cleared away and everything would
quickly be put back in order.
Newsmen and network anchors also behaved with more excitement than
trepidation. They flew to New Orleans expecting some dramatic scenes of
themselves in rain gear leaning into the wind to shout live reports into a
microphone. They would bemoan the property damage and some loss of life,
before packing up and flying back to New York or on to another assignment.
But that wasn't how Hurricane Katrina played out. Instead the storm and its
devastation brought a national awakening - or at least the beginning of
one - with large numbers of Americans finally catching on to the gap between
Bush's rhetoric and reality.
Before Katrina, the mix of Bush's folksy charm, the lasting emotions from
9/11 and the powerful right-wing media/political apparatus had kept most
Americans under the President's spell.
In a way, Bush's ability to mesmerize so many people fit with a different
type of thriller movie, one in which a harrowing truth dawns slowly on a
community although the recognition of danger may have come too late.
Ignored Warnings
There had been plenty of warnings about the precarious topographical
situation facing New Orleans, one of the nation's best-known and best-loved
cities, the home of jazz, Cajun cooking and Mardi Gras.
Government experts and journalists knew that a severe hurricane could force
a storm surge that would push the waters of Lake Pontchartrain over the
levees and flood large sections of the city that sat below sea level. New
Orleans was often compared to a saucer that would quickly fill if liquid
began pouring over the edges.
In a report prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Federal Emergency Management
Administration had listed a hurricane inundating New Orleans as one of the
three most likely catastrophes hitting the United States, along with a
terrorist assault on New York City and a San Francisco earthquake.
A series of articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2004 had detailed
the looming threat, which was made worse by budgetary neglect of the sinking
levee system and an incomplete reconstruction.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to
handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price
we pay," said Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be
finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a
security issue for us."
A possible breach of the levees also was a major topic of discussion on news
and weather channels as Katrina churned through the Gulf. Yet, when Katrina
crashed ashore, wreaking devastation along the coasts of Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama, government officials - local, state and federal -
seemed taken aback, at times almost paralyzed.
The flood broke through the levees protecting New Orleans Ninth Ward,
filling block after block with muddy fetid water. Tens of thousands of
residents were trapped; hundreds drowning in their homes; others seeking
refuge in emergency shelters at the Superdome and at the Convention Center.
On Aug. 30, 2005, the Times-Picayune posted a story at its Web site saying
"no one can say they didn't see it coming."
It took a while for the magnitude of the New Orleans disaster to become
clear. The big-name newscasters who had pre-positioned themselves in the
storm's path - the likes of NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's Anderson Cooper -
sounded more shocked at first than horrified.
After the storm passed, they looked out their hotel windows at the strange
sight of city streets covered in water. Then, as the summer heat returned,
the journalists moved out around the city, often by boat, to witness a scene
more befitting the Third World than the world's superpower.
Bloated bodies floated in the water or rotted in the hot sun. Hundreds of
residents, trapped in their homes, frantically tore through attic ceilings
to climb out onto roof tops and to wave their arms for help. Others drowned
in steamy attics as the water kept rising.
The Superdome, which had hosted Super Bowl games and other national sporting
events, quickly became infamous as a scene of unspeakable living conditions
as New Orleans residents sweltered inside amid overflowing toilets and
urine-soaked artificial turf.
The U.S. government along with local and state authorities appeared
powerless to respond quickly. Instead, federal, state and local officials
descended into rounds of acrimonious finger-pointing.
The Katrina crisis also brought to light some of Bush's leadership
weaknesses that had been hidden behind White House P.R. curtains during his
first term.
In a retrospective on the Katrina disaster, Newsweek's Evan Thomas reported
that "it's a standing joke among the President's top aides: who gets to
deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and
snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of
the President of the United States."
On Aug. 30, after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the New Orleans levees, the
White House staff was in full cringe mode. Someone was going to have to tell
Bush that he needed to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days.
Though Bush did agree to return to Washington, he remained in a protective
bubble about how bad the Katrina news really was. Before devoting his
attention to the catastrophe, he fulfilled speaking commitments in San Diego
and Phoenix - even clowning with a gift guitar - before heading back to
Washington.
Since Bush famously shuns reading newspapers or watching the news, his staff
decided that the best way to clue Bush in on how bad things were was to burn
a special DVD with TV footage of the flood so he could watch the DVD on Air
Force One, Newsweek's Thomas reported.
"How this could be - how the President of the United States could have even
less 'situational awareness,' as they say in the military, than the average
American about the worse natural disaster in a century - is one of the more
perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of
heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace," Thomas
wrote.
Progressive Media
The Katrina debacle also represented the first significant test of whether
the marginal inroads that American progressives had made in talk radio and
the Internet would have any measurable effect.
Certainly, pro-Bush right-wing talk radio was doing the best it could to
divert blame from the Bush administration onto New Orleans' black mayor Ray
Nagin, Louisiana's Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco and the mostly black
survivors of New Orleans who had been trapped by the storm.
Some right-wing AM radio talkers said "able-bodied" people who lacked
transportation should simply have walked out of New Orleans. In other words,
if these folks weren't so lazy and stupid, they would have used their own
two feet.
But the idea of trying to out-walk a hurricane with 150-mile-per-hour winds
would seem nutty to anyone who's ever lived through even a milder storm.
Still, the argument gave Bush's base another reason not to blame the
President or his team.
For once, however, there was another side of the story reaching listeners on
the AM dial.
As the seriousness of the Katrina crisis sank in on Aug. 31, Robert Parry
was driving north from Washington to Montreal for a previously scheduled
meeting. He wrote at Consortiumnews.com that "while on the road, I also got
a taste of how valuable progressive talk radio could be for arming American
liberals with facts and for persuading Middle Americans that the nation
needs new leadership.
"As I drove past New York City, I picked up an Air America Radio station
where the hosts explained how Bush's spending in Iraq had diverted money
needed to strengthen New Orleans' levees and how deployment of National
Guard troops in Iraq had undermined the Guard's ability to respond to the
disaster.
"What was even more striking was the anger and passion in the voices of Air
America listeners who called in from all over the country. They were furious
over the national disgrace that was unfolding in New Orleans, as Bush
vacationed in Texas and then responded haltingly to the crisis.
But the radio signal of the New York City station faded as I reached upstate
New York. The only AM talk radio I could get then was the far more pervasive
conservative variety. On those stations, the New Orleans crisis either was
treated as not that big a deal or as something to blame on anybody but
Bush."
Bush Visit
When Bush finally made his belated trip to the Gulf Coast on Sept. 2, the
DVD strategy did not appear to have worked. He still seemed disconnected
from the human tragedy and more interested in suggesting that the
catastrophe was unforeseen.
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Bush told ABC's
Diane Sawyer, although the threat to the levees had been recognized for
years.
As tens of thousands of mostly poor and black citizens endured squalor in
flooded New Orleans, Bush slid into his role of peppy cheerleader and
consoled friends like Sen. Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, who had
lost one of his homes.
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house -
there's going to be a fantastic house," Bush joshed. "And I'm looking
forward to sitting on the porch."
Bush also had some encouraging words for his hapless FEMA director, Michael
Brown. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said.
Before boarding a flight back to Washington, Bush continued to banter amid
the suffering. Playing for laughs, Bush recalled his past hard partying in
New Orleans, which he called "the town where I used to come . to enjoy
myself, occasionally too much."
That night during a televised fundraiser for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye
West veered off script to criticize the media for its perceived bias against
African-Americans and George Bush for his lackadaisical response to the
disaster.
"I hate the way they portray us in the media," West said. "If you see a
black family it says they are looting [but] if you see a white family it
says they are looking for food."
Summing up the President's attitude, West said, "George Bush doesn't care
about black people." The remark sent NBC executives into a panic that led
them to censor West's comments from the show's rebroadcast in the Pacific
time zone.
On Saturday, Sept. 3, driving back toward Washington, Robert Parry reported
that "I reached the New York City area and again tuned in the Air America
station. But I was disappointed to hear only the broadcast of pre-recorded
'best-of' content, some of it predating Hurricane Katrina.
"Air America appeared to lack the resources to dispatch correspondents to
the scene and offer special live weekend coverage of the crisis. I did,
however, find live right-wing talk radio, including more blame being heaped
on the trapped New Orleans residents for not using their feet and walking
out of the city before the hurricane hit."
Cracked Image
For once, however, the right-wing media couldn't dictate the terms of a
national story. Not only had the New Orleans levees broken, but the dams
protecting George W. Bush's image were cracking, too.
This time when Bush fumbled a national crisis, many leading newscasters were
on scene to witness the debacle and other journalists echoed their
first-hand assessments of the chaos and ineptitude.
With New Orleans turned into a giant cesspool - and with bloated remains of
American citizens left for days to rot in the sun - the nation was finally
shaking itself alert and finding the nightmare all too real.
Facing a suddenly critical news media and a sharp decline in poll numbers,
Bush revised his approach to the crisis. He ordered up more trips to the
region; posed with more African-Americans; and vowed a vast rebuilding
project on par with what he promised for Iraq.
But his mother stepped on Bush's new compassion. During a visit to Katrina
evacuees in Houston's Astrodome, former First Lady Barbara Bush expressed
her discomfort over "what I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all
want to stay in Texas. .
"So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway, so this - this (she chuckles) is working very well for them."
Bush, the ersatz populist, looked like a phony to many Americans when he
gave a nationally televised speech in shirt sleeves in New Orleans' Jackson
Square with special generators and lighting that had been flown in to give
him a dramatic backdrop.
"We will do what it takes; we will stay as long as it takes," Bush declared
on Sept. 15 in phrasing reminiscent of his pledges about Iraq.
But many prominent figures in the mainstream U.S. news media weren't buying
Bush's P.R. offensive this time. New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote
that the Katrina disaster had exposed, once and for all, Bush's incompetence
and phoniness.
"Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard
again," Rich wrote. "He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil
salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American
psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked
George W. Bush.
"The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this President
because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant
cronyism, the empty sloganeering of 'compassionate conservatism,' the lack
of concern for the 'underprivileged' his mother condescended to at the
Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations
except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to
substitute for action."
Political moderates also were having second thoughts. Times columnist Thomas
L. Friedman, who supported the Iraq War and other parts of Bush's foreign
policy, concluded that Katrina had left Bush's ship of state adrift.
Friedman wrote: "Katrina deprived the Bush team of the energy source that
propelled it forward for the last four years: 9/11 and the halo over the
presidency that came with it. The events of 9/11 created a deference in the
U.S. public, and media, for the administration, which exploited it to the
hilt to push an uncompassionate conservative agenda on tax cuts and runaway
spending, on which it never could have gotten elected. That deference is
over."
"There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch
feign being in touch," observed another New York Times columnist, Maureen
Dowd. "On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he
took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he
had spent some 'quality time' at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered
about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the 'can-do
spirit.'
"'We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job,'
he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Mississippi. . The more the President
echoes his dad's 'Message: I care,' the more the world hears 'Message: I
can't.'"
But the overriding question remained: Did this American awakening arrive too
late? Was there still time to stop Bush and his allies from consolidating
their political control over the federal government?
(Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush is available both at
the publisher's Web site, http://www.neckdeepbook.com [2], and at Amazon.com
[3]. If you buy the book through the publisher's Web site, $5 will be
rebated to Consortiumnews.com to help defray the costs of the site's
original news articles and investigative journalism.)
_______
About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com [4]. It's also available at Amazon.com [5], as is
his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News [6]
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson