Does the Bush ranch in Crawford have a situation room, or any type of military communications whatsoever? Does Cheney's Wyoming spread? Does Air Force One? Did Rumsfeld know how to use a telephone? Can anyone explain why a well-equipped United States Navy ship with six operating rooms, 600 hospital beds, and a desalinization unit capable of making 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day bobbed empty off Louisiana but for its crew from the start of Hurricane Katrina's descent on the gulf coast, through the long hellish killing week, and still lays empty today?
This from the Chicago Tribune's stunning report:
Now the [USS] Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
How could a President of the United States not have a competent grasp of the disposition of major military assets in a time of crisis? Is this even possible? [Even a cursory glance at a Tom Clancy book suggests not]. Or is this President, this administration, this group of bumblers so blind and deaf and unbriefed and out of touch that it doesn't bother with information of this kind; the nitty-gritty of running a massive Federal government of the world's superpower just isn't all that engrossing. I think Chervokas nails it in this post:
In times of crises one never gets a sense that George Bush is in a situation war room, fully abreast of every fact, riding herd over departmental underlings to make sure resources are rushed into service. In fact, the picture that emerged from Katrina is one of a lazy, hands-off president--briefly flying over the disaster scene on his way back from a month-long vacation while people drowned below him, taking charge of the situation only five days later after being shamed into action by TV news reporters.
But it's not just laziness and incompetence and lack of interest. I'll tell you what it is: philosophical doctrine.
Conservative doctrine.
Failed, discredited, immoral, racist, un-Godly conservative doctrine.
For this crew, government is bad in its essence, whilst power remains good; that's a strange, warped view to govern under, but it's what we now have at the helm of the United States. This government did not act because under its philosophy government should not act. Government does best when it stays out of the way, and lets folks just be folks. Caveat: except in oil-rich foreign lands. Then, government action is an investment in resource exploitation, er, democracy and freedom.
No, this government sat back on its heels, was horribly incapable of acting, because action was anathema to its soul. Heck, better to roll back the estate tax - or do away with bankruptcy protection for the middle class and working poor. Poverty has risen for five consecutive years for the first time in U.S. history: that's a good thing, the markets are at work, things will even out. The business of America is business, said another failed Republican, in pre-Depression mode. Nice little saying.
No, true hard-core conservatives do not believe in a social compact, a common effort, knitting all classes together. They believe in winner take all, nobly expressed post-Katrina by Alexander Cockburn at CounterPunch (thankee, James):
Once you stop believing in universal betterment, you stop investing in social defenses, like health care, or flood control. You build your shining condo on the hill, put a fence round it, and cancel the local bus service so the poor can't get at you..."So collective effort goes out the window, and soon the society forgets how collective effort works. Tens of thousands of poor people standing on roofs in the Delta and they haven't the slightest idea how to get them off. The ones they have brought to dry land they dump on the highway, where they stand as the Army trucks roll by.
Don't talk about race or the growing, aching divide between the landed, invested, trust fund Americans and the rest of the debt-addled, wage-leaking, health care-lacking slobs. That's class warfare, son! That's dividin'. That's hatred right there.
So now Karl Rove runs out his own hurricano - the big spinning machine, churning sewege and destruction - to blame local authorities, local mayors, local councilmembers. To blame the poor. To blame the blacks. Make the President look better, now. If a man scruples to unmask an undercover CIA agent, thinks the cynic, he won't trifle with a few poor black folks.
Keep the agenda alive, the conservative agenda. Get government off our backs. No handouts. Land of opportunity. Spreading freedom throughout the world. Keep the South solid red state territory; preserve the divisions regardless to preserve the vote. This is Rove's mandate now.
Need help in a crisis?
Don't ask the conservatives.
