To all my friends who’ve been emailing me asking me why I haven’t blogged, why I’ve missed opportunities to insult that paragon of milk toast, John Roberts, why I haven’t said anything about DeLay or Frist’s latest shenanigans or how I could refrain from commenting on last night’s news about the latest development in Rove’s Plamegate, just let me say this: those Asians over there in Hong Kong kicked my ass and I’ve been too tired to do anything other than watch network TV, which, by the way has left me traumatized because Alias killed off uber-cute spy Michael Vartan.
I will say this about Hong Kong: it’s the best diet I’ve ever been on. When your choices of fine dining include pork knuckles and jellyfish, sliced pig’s ear or chicken maw (dried stomach lining), I’ll settle for just a bottle of that really bad Chilean wine they have. When you go into a supposedly fine restaurant and Conch Y Torro is all they have on the list, you know you ain’t in Kansas anymore. Well, actually, you probably are, but you sure as hell aren’t in Napa, which I now consider sacred ground. To paraphrase the Texans: don’t mess with Napa. Unless you are Sonoma.
The highlight of my Asian trip involved either Americans or Canadians. I’d like to think they were Canadian because it adds to the story, but I never got the chance to find out. Miss Paris (you remember her from earlier blogs) and I were at Totts, on top of the Excelsior, having a late night café latte (pretty sure it was made with Nescafe) when all of a sudden, this band takes the stage.
The lead singer took a detour in 1984 and never looked back. She wore a cabbie hat, a striped shirt with a big wide belt, and knickers. She looked like a bad Pat Benetar, which is saying something. The drummer decided to do a Mohawk style hairdo without getting an actual hair cut. Let’s just say it involved a tube of gel. The bass and guitar players were rejects from Rufus. Then there was the backup singer, the only Asian in the bunch. She was about 6 feet tall and a size zero, and for some reason, had on see-through pants with high-rise yellow underwear. I don’t think it was intended as a fashion statement. In fact, I think the whole band reveled in one large fashion faux pas.
Can anyone explain to me what “T to the O to the R to the Y” means? The lead singer, “Pat” kept saying that. We figured her name was Tory or the band’s name was Tory. Then she would walk into the audience and go up to someone with a mike, who was dancing on the dance floor and go, “Scuse me! Did I ever tell you I’m so proud of you honey bunny?”
Our jaws were dropped the entire set. By the time she did an odd melody of Get Down On It, Every Breath You Take and Boogie Nights our heads were spinning like the Exorcist. I know. I didn’t get that melody either.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any odder, she yells “DRUMS!” while doing a two-armed wave. The drummer flies into a solo, the top of his half-ass mohawked gel thudding around on his head. Then a moment later we hear her say, as she does air guitar, “Give me a little guitar.” Rufus reject did
The highlight was “Da Doo Doo Doo, Da Da Da Da.” Talk about your dadaist moment. The back up singer took over lead vocals and got down and dirty with the audience, handing the mike to old Japanese tourists cutting a rug on the dance floor. They spoke-sang the refrain and left out the “Ls” just like on TV. One man in particular like to point when he shuffled-danced. He mainly pointed at the floor. His rendition of the song was particular poignant as he would not turn the mike back over to the singer and she had to pull it away.
Then there was the blonde lady who liked to simply spin on the dance floor. She spinned like a top. She had an Asian girlfriend who was trying to keep up with her, but could actually dance, and it was getting in the way of her constant spinning.
There really was no way to top this band on the trip, not even the chicken maw. We never found out their name, and they did not play the next night, our final night in Hong Kong.
When people tour a place, a bit of the locale remains with them. The scent of a place, the view from a particular location, the sounds. For me and Miss Paris, our memory of Hong Kong will involve bad food and a really funny, but terrible band of Americans. Or Canadians. We’ll never know.
September 30, 2005
September 27, 2005
Too Jet-lagged for a Clever Headline
I’m back from Hong Kong, and I was horrified to learn that while I was gone, Cheney underwent surgery, and W took over as president.
Turns out, he did a great job! No new wars were started, pus, Rove learned from his mistakes with Katrina and had W do smart-acting things. I think I should leave the country more often.
Cheney made it through surgery with flying colors, which proves that if there is a god, he does not listen to my prayers. Of course, maybe he did and disagreed with me, thinking it’s better to have Cheney/Rove at the helm than to actually have W running things. He’s probably right – it’s best to just let W (and his woefully jack-assy supporters) think he’s running things.
On an ironic note, while in Hong Kong, we had a level 3 typhoon. I didn’t think it was a big deal till I read the daily English paper, which referred to Rita as the same kind of typhoon. Either the report was wrong, or those folks in Hong Kong really know how to withstand a hurricane.
By the way, if you should find yourself in Hong Kong, go with the intention of dieting, unless your idea of a good meal is pork knuckles with jelly fish, or sliced pig’s ear. My advice, if you like sushi, get your hepatitis A shot and dine at Wasabisabi every night. It was the only good meal in town.
When I finally recover from my trip (my body is 15 hours ahead and thinks I should be either sleeping or eating chicken maw) I will try to entertain you with a travel log of my journey. In the meantime, I need to bond all over with my cat, Sammy Davis, Jr, whose abandonment issues are acting up. He doesn't understand that gifts from the litter box are actually not gifts -- and in this case, it is not the thought that counts.
Turns out, he did a great job! No new wars were started, pus, Rove learned from his mistakes with Katrina and had W do smart-acting things. I think I should leave the country more often.
Cheney made it through surgery with flying colors, which proves that if there is a god, he does not listen to my prayers. Of course, maybe he did and disagreed with me, thinking it’s better to have Cheney/Rove at the helm than to actually have W running things. He’s probably right – it’s best to just let W (and his woefully jack-assy supporters) think he’s running things.
On an ironic note, while in Hong Kong, we had a level 3 typhoon. I didn’t think it was a big deal till I read the daily English paper, which referred to Rita as the same kind of typhoon. Either the report was wrong, or those folks in Hong Kong really know how to withstand a hurricane.
By the way, if you should find yourself in Hong Kong, go with the intention of dieting, unless your idea of a good meal is pork knuckles with jelly fish, or sliced pig’s ear. My advice, if you like sushi, get your hepatitis A shot and dine at Wasabisabi every night. It was the only good meal in town.
When I finally recover from my trip (my body is 15 hours ahead and thinks I should be either sleeping or eating chicken maw) I will try to entertain you with a travel log of my journey. In the meantime, I need to bond all over with my cat, Sammy Davis, Jr, whose abandonment issues are acting up. He doesn't understand that gifts from the litter box are actually not gifts -- and in this case, it is not the thought that counts.
September 17, 2005
Great Quote About the Master of Disaster
I'm off to Hong Kong for a while, so I may not get a chance to blog again for over a week. It all depends on my work schedule and my proximity to Internet hookup. In recent weeks, there's been a lot said about how truly awful Bush is as a President, and as a human being. I've said my fair share, but in case I don't get to post for a while, I want to leave you with the best quote I've heard so far about George W. Bush.
"You've performed so poor, I'm surprised you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes. On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon, and the city of New Orleans . Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country, I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So yes, God does speak to you, and what he's saying is, 'Take a hint.'" --Bill Maher
"You've performed so poor, I'm surprised you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire metropolis to rising water and snakes. On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon, and the city of New Orleans . Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country, I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side. So yes, God does speak to you, and what he's saying is, 'Take a hint.'" --Bill Maher
September 16, 2005
Fox News Loves Bush
Fox News is so in-love with George W. Bush. I’m not just talking about that squat little man with too much bad hair (Hannity or whatever) and his pansy-ass “democrat” side-kick. All those um, reporters (?) over there love, love, love George W. Bush. They remind me of me when I was 16 and truly believed that Bruce Springsteen and I would one day wed. I had his posters all over my wall and for a time, I considered calling myself Mary (anyone who knows Bruce gets this reference). But even with my teenaged dreams, I knew that deep down that Bruce was just a guy from Jersey who would probably prefer tall, lanky, redheads to, well, minors.
I had insomnia this morning, so I was up at 3:00am, flipping channels when I landed on that Hannity guy and I stopped cold because I saw something in his eyes. Love. Unrequited, devout, full of passion, love. He was talking about how wonderful W’s speech in NoLa was last night. The so-called democrat didn’t say squat, except to close the show. Then this blonde chick and another squatty guy came on. I didn’t catch their names, but they are like the Regis and Kelly of Fox News. Except they really love W and I’m not sure Regis and Kelly even vote. They couldn’t believe how perfect W’s speech was and how he said all the right things and he hit every note and golly wow, he’s handled this whole Katrina thing like a leader.
I slapped myself. I thought I was having a nightmare. But no, I was awake. I flipped over to CNN to see what they had to say. They showed a snippet of W from his speech. His mouth was all contorted like it gets when he is trying to form words. His eyes were all cock-eyed. Would someone please tell me what’s wrong with his eyes and how come we don’t’ talk more openly about this? Is this like when FDR was in a wheel chair and no one talked about it? Or how Condi Rice is a lesbian and no one talks about that? But I digress.
From what I heard, it was pure Karl Rove at his most evil. Lots of platitudes. Lots of promises. No stats, no plan to pay for any of this. Yadda yadda yadda bite me.
So the fact that he’s such a dumbass and a bad leader means that the feelings those folks have for W must be real, true love. Does he realize how lucky he is to have an entire news channel devoted to promoting the worship of him?
I know W doesn’t read, but if there’s a God, and W say he has a personal relationship with Him, since God is omnipotent, I have a message that needs relaying: God, would you pass this on to W, who doesn’t read. W, please give the folks at Fox a phone call and say Hi. It would really make their day. Maybe you could send over a gift basket for that Hannity fellow and another two to the Fox version of Regis and Kelly. They are suffering they love you so much. It’s damaged the way they think. They’ve lost all their journalistic training (but I’m assuming that they had some). Please W, since you hate it when people disagree with you, here’s some love bunnies who just want to bask in the light that is you.
Thanks, God for relaying that. If W doesn’t respond to my request, should I assume that you two don’t talk much anymore?
I had insomnia this morning, so I was up at 3:00am, flipping channels when I landed on that Hannity guy and I stopped cold because I saw something in his eyes. Love. Unrequited, devout, full of passion, love. He was talking about how wonderful W’s speech in NoLa was last night. The so-called democrat didn’t say squat, except to close the show. Then this blonde chick and another squatty guy came on. I didn’t catch their names, but they are like the Regis and Kelly of Fox News. Except they really love W and I’m not sure Regis and Kelly even vote. They couldn’t believe how perfect W’s speech was and how he said all the right things and he hit every note and golly wow, he’s handled this whole Katrina thing like a leader.
I slapped myself. I thought I was having a nightmare. But no, I was awake. I flipped over to CNN to see what they had to say. They showed a snippet of W from his speech. His mouth was all contorted like it gets when he is trying to form words. His eyes were all cock-eyed. Would someone please tell me what’s wrong with his eyes and how come we don’t’ talk more openly about this? Is this like when FDR was in a wheel chair and no one talked about it? Or how Condi Rice is a lesbian and no one talks about that? But I digress.
From what I heard, it was pure Karl Rove at his most evil. Lots of platitudes. Lots of promises. No stats, no plan to pay for any of this. Yadda yadda yadda bite me.
So the fact that he’s such a dumbass and a bad leader means that the feelings those folks have for W must be real, true love. Does he realize how lucky he is to have an entire news channel devoted to promoting the worship of him?
I know W doesn’t read, but if there’s a God, and W say he has a personal relationship with Him, since God is omnipotent, I have a message that needs relaying: God, would you pass this on to W, who doesn’t read. W, please give the folks at Fox a phone call and say Hi. It would really make their day. Maybe you could send over a gift basket for that Hannity fellow and another two to the Fox version of Regis and Kelly. They are suffering they love you so much. It’s damaged the way they think. They’ve lost all their journalistic training (but I’m assuming that they had some). Please W, since you hate it when people disagree with you, here’s some love bunnies who just want to bask in the light that is you.
Thanks, God for relaying that. If W doesn’t respond to my request, should I assume that you two don’t talk much anymore?
September 14, 2005
Hey, Let's Not Pay the Workers Anything!
Um, I hope my boss doesn’t read the papers. He might get ideas if he gets wind of W’s latest coup. Of all the disgusting mistakes the Prez has made since Katrina hit (or period), this has got be the worst. He has issued an executive order allowing federal contractors (his buddies) to pay below the prevailing wage in the devastated areas. If he thinks those areas are the only things devastated, he hasn’t asked the workers how they feel about his order.
Okay, for all two of you die-hard Republicans reading this, tell me, do you actually prefer this cock-eyed half-wit whose biggest talent is being smug to Clinton’s sex scandals? I don’t think that W’s daddy would even do such a thing like this. I’m not even sure Reagan would have done this. I’m just, once again, floored by this guy. And I’m even more floored that he still has a strong base of supporters. This is a Wake Up and Smell the Coffee moment if I ever saw one.
Okay, for all two of you die-hard Republicans reading this, tell me, do you actually prefer this cock-eyed half-wit whose biggest talent is being smug to Clinton’s sex scandals? I don’t think that W’s daddy would even do such a thing like this. I’m not even sure Reagan would have done this. I’m just, once again, floored by this guy. And I’m even more floored that he still has a strong base of supporters. This is a Wake Up and Smell the Coffee moment if I ever saw one.
How I Learned Responsibility from the President
W’s statement the other day, that “to the extent that it was the Federal Government’s fault,” he will take responsibility, inspired me. I haven’t heard an apology that good since Clinton begrudgingly apologized to the nation for the Monica thing. So I have decided that if the President can put caveats around his apologies, so can I. Screw what my mama taught me about “owning up” to my mistakes. Mama Bush obviously never taught W that, and hey, she’s the best mother of all, right?
So today, my boss called me in his office and he said, “You’re the head of marketing, tell me why we aren’t getting any press.” I was about to confess that I had been slow to send out a press release on our latest product launch because I was off playing guitar with my buddy in California (I have a nice photo of me with this fat acoustic thing strapped around my shoulder) when I remembered what W said.
“To the extent that marketing is responsible for our lack of press, I accept responsibility,” I said.
Amazingly, he said “Good enough.” My boss thinks Marketing can do no wrong, because we believe in “hard work,” and “staying the course,” when it comes to building our brand. We are resolute in our commitment to not pull out of any campaigns we have going, even if we are in markets that don’t want us there. Like Iraq.
Then later, the head of our board called my boss and said, “Why is business down?” My boss, remembering W himself, said, “To the extent that my division is responsible for business being down, I accept responsibility.”
W has done the corporate world so much good, and I’m not just talking about those no-bid contracts to his buddies for rebuilding New Orleans.
When I came home tonight, I found an earring on my pillow. It was not mine. So when hubby came home, I said, “What the fuck?” And I held up the earring.
“To the extent that someone may have left an earring on your pillow that does not belong to you and therefore was left there in questionable circumstances, I accept responsibility.”
So I clobbered him over the head with one of my Prada shoes. The heel was quite heavy and left a nice reminder of his responsibility.
The police came. An officer asked, as he was handcuffing me, “What did you do???”
“To the extent that my husband is responsible for getting what he deserves, I accept responsibility.”
Unfortunately, I don’t know any high-powered lawyers who are friends of Bush, so this partial responsibility thing may not work out. Unless I get a Republican judge, then he will probably appreciate my defense.
So today, my boss called me in his office and he said, “You’re the head of marketing, tell me why we aren’t getting any press.” I was about to confess that I had been slow to send out a press release on our latest product launch because I was off playing guitar with my buddy in California (I have a nice photo of me with this fat acoustic thing strapped around my shoulder) when I remembered what W said.
“To the extent that marketing is responsible for our lack of press, I accept responsibility,” I said.
Amazingly, he said “Good enough.” My boss thinks Marketing can do no wrong, because we believe in “hard work,” and “staying the course,” when it comes to building our brand. We are resolute in our commitment to not pull out of any campaigns we have going, even if we are in markets that don’t want us there. Like Iraq.
Then later, the head of our board called my boss and said, “Why is business down?” My boss, remembering W himself, said, “To the extent that my division is responsible for business being down, I accept responsibility.”
W has done the corporate world so much good, and I’m not just talking about those no-bid contracts to his buddies for rebuilding New Orleans.
When I came home tonight, I found an earring on my pillow. It was not mine. So when hubby came home, I said, “What the fuck?” And I held up the earring.
“To the extent that someone may have left an earring on your pillow that does not belong to you and therefore was left there in questionable circumstances, I accept responsibility.”
So I clobbered him over the head with one of my Prada shoes. The heel was quite heavy and left a nice reminder of his responsibility.
The police came. An officer asked, as he was handcuffing me, “What did you do???”
“To the extent that my husband is responsible for getting what he deserves, I accept responsibility.”
Unfortunately, I don’t know any high-powered lawyers who are friends of Bush, so this partial responsibility thing may not work out. Unless I get a Republican judge, then he will probably appreciate my defense.
September 12, 2005
They Shoot Looters, Don’t They.
Notice the headline is not a question. Okay, I’m in shock over this one.
What the hell? First off, what looters? Aren’t they all gone, and secondly, do they really need mercenaries? This Government is getting scarier and scarier. I am all for impeaching Bush, but damn, I don’t think we want to stop with him.
What the hell? First off, what looters? Aren’t they all gone, and secondly, do they really need mercenaries? This Government is getting scarier and scarier. I am all for impeaching Bush, but damn, I don’t think we want to stop with him.
My Version of a Stiff Drink
After a long day of listening to the woes of my friends and family in Mississippi and New Orleans, who have to rebuild their lives, I enjoy a little Republican-bashing to take the edge off. Not that I blame the Republican administration for them losing their homes. I really wish I could, but as powerful as they may be, they can’t unleash a Category 5 hurricane. Well, unless you blame them for global warming, but I digress. Anyway, this article, helped relieve some of that built up tension I’ve been feeling.
There was another fabulous article about how W’s problem is that he’s a sociopath. That one got me through this morning, but then I had to go an accidentally delete the link. I’m also looking for articles on the doctor in Gulfport who, when asked if he could say one thing to President Cheney, said, “Yeah. Fuck you Mr. Cheney. Fuck you.” And they say you can’t find decent doctors in Mississippi.
There was another fabulous article about how W’s problem is that he’s a sociopath. That one got me through this morning, but then I had to go an accidentally delete the link. I’m also looking for articles on the doctor in Gulfport who, when asked if he could say one thing to President Cheney, said, “Yeah. Fuck you Mr. Cheney. Fuck you.” And they say you can’t find decent doctors in Mississippi.
How Bush (and pretty much everyone) Blew It
Someone sent me this article in its entirety, so rather than post the link, I’m posting the article. If you are looking for a fair and balanced, and in-depth account of what went wrong in the last two weeks, this is a good article to read.
Bureaucratic timidity. Bad phone lines. And a failure of imagination. Why the government was so slow to respond to catastrophe.
By Evan Thomas / Newsweek
Sept. 19, 2005 - 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, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.
The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
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 worst 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.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina—like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11—was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take charge—and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.
Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.
Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.
The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.
Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.
Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.
But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center."Max Mayfield has scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared," responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the city—about a day later than for most other cities and counties along the GulfCoast.
As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that was close." But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. "HolyG od," she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.
At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter fly over of the city. Hes eemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said. "Do you have a conference-call line?" According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."
Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense of what had happened. "Nobody was saying it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told news-week. "We were saying, 'Thank you, God,' because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even worse."
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."
Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."
Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the fearful faces on some young police officers—the ones who actually showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm not going to judge you.")
At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there ... and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There didn't seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.
Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She asked for 40,000 troops. "I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later told NEWSWEEK.
The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent into make it ready. By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters—but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV crews, moved faster.
In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.
The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters—FEMA—was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told news-week. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.
The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."
According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have amore-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."
A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over—if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well,what do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"
The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
With T. Trent Gegax, Arian Campo-Flores, Andrew Murr, Susannah Meadows,Jonathan Darman and Catharine Skipp in the gulf coast region, and RichardWolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball, Tamara Lipper, John Barry, DanielKlaidman, Michael Isikoff, Michael Hirsh, Eve Conant, Martha Brant, PatriciaWingert, Eleanor Clift and Steve Tuttle in Washington
Bureaucratic timidity. Bad phone lines. And a failure of imagination. Why the government was so slow to respond to catastrophe.
By Evan Thomas / Newsweek
Sept. 19, 2005 - 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, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.
The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
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 worst 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.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to Katrina—like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11—was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take charge—and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.
Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented, "forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops. Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences; his private advice is not known.
Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.
The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.
Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.
Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe. A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta. During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger floodwalls and levees.
But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center."Max Mayfield has scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared," responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the city—about a day later than for most other cities and counties along the GulfCoast.
As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that was close." But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. "HolyG od," she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.
At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter fly over of the city. Hes eemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington," he said. "Do you have a conference-call line?" According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you don't understand."
Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense of what had happened. "Nobody was saying it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told news-week. "We were saying, 'Thank you, God,' because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even worse."
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."
Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."
Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the fearful faces on some young police officers—the ones who actually showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm not going to judge you.")
At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there ... and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There didn't seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.
Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She asked for 40,000 troops. "I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later told NEWSWEEK.
The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent into make it ready. By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicopters—but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV crews, moved faster.
In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.
The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters—FEMA—was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told news-week. "I thought to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.
The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."
According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of "who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, "We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have amore-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do it."
A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over—if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well,what do you think of that, Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately." To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"
The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
With T. Trent Gegax, Arian Campo-Flores, Andrew Murr, Susannah Meadows,Jonathan Darman and Catharine Skipp in the gulf coast region, and RichardWolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball, Tamara Lipper, John Barry, DanielKlaidman, Michael Isikoff, Michael Hirsh, Eve Conant, Martha Brant, PatriciaWingert, Eleanor Clift and Steve Tuttle in Washington
September 09, 2005
W's Disaster Gumbo
I love to cook, and having so much family from New Orleans, it's only natural that I picked up a few Cajun recipes. Turns out, W loves to cook Cajun food, too. I came across this recipe of his just the other day:
Disaster Gumbo, Neocon Style
Ingredients
1 hearty chunk federal funding
1 heaping serving of tax cuts
1 monster hurricane
nicely-aged levy
several bazillion tons of fetid water
The city of New Orleans.
Cut federal funding, mix with tax cuts until it debilitates the ability of federal agencies. Pour batch into Iraq. In a separate bowl, toss in monster hurricane. Break levy in several places so water can soak New Orleans until its soupy. Let sit under hot sun in fetid water. You'll know it's done when it tests positive for E. Coli.
Notes: this gumbo is hard work. To finish, you will stay the course. After all, you didn’t ask for this, but you are full of resolve.
If any one can find W's recipe for Gulf Coast Jambalaya, please send it to me. I hear it's similar to the gumbo, just use less water and leave out the levy.
Disaster Gumbo, Neocon Style
Ingredients
1 hearty chunk federal funding
1 heaping serving of tax cuts
1 monster hurricane
nicely-aged levy
several bazillion tons of fetid water
The city of New Orleans.
Cut federal funding, mix with tax cuts until it debilitates the ability of federal agencies. Pour batch into Iraq. In a separate bowl, toss in monster hurricane. Break levy in several places so water can soak New Orleans until its soupy. Let sit under hot sun in fetid water. You'll know it's done when it tests positive for E. Coli.
Notes: this gumbo is hard work. To finish, you will stay the course. After all, you didn’t ask for this, but you are full of resolve.
If any one can find W's recipe for Gulf Coast Jambalaya, please send it to me. I hear it's similar to the gumbo, just use less water and leave out the levy.
September 08, 2005
W Is Getting the Credit He Deserves
This is the best thing I’ve read about Bush
bar none. Only one thing pisses me off: why in the hell couldn’t I have written that?
Check out the comments on his site. I love it. W, it’s starting to look like there’s more of us who hate you than love you.
bar none. Only one thing pisses me off: why in the hell couldn’t I have written that?
Check out the comments on his site. I love it. W, it’s starting to look like there’s more of us who hate you than love you.
September 06, 2005
W Isn’t the Only Person Behaving Badly
Of the nine family members that were missing, it looks like eight are accounted for. My cousin HJ is still missing, and yes, we’ve posted his name to the different Internet sites. HJ, you are constantly in our thoughts.
Today at work, I was telling one of my pals the news about my family, when my boss walked in. He’s not the most well-liked person in the place. In fact, I’ve heard more than one person say that they loathe him. In the last week, he’s never once asked me if there is any word on my family. When he walked into the middle of the conversation, he actually had the audacity to quip, “maybe he’s at Ellen DeGeneres’ sister house.” I didn’t laugh. My pal didn’t laugh. He changed the subject to something work related and I walked out of the room. Later, I saw him in the hall and gave him my best evil eye. It was a waste of an evil eye. He was too self-absorbed to notice. HJ, a good person whom everyone loves, is missing, maybe dead. My boss, who looks like a chickpea with legs and has the personality of a rattlesnake, is A okay. Universe, what happened to Karma?
I’m really stunned by how many people there are out there who just don’t care about this crisis. Fortunately, they are in the minority.
The other small faction of people I find appalling are the one I’ve talked to recently who are criticizing the black people who were stranded in New Orleans. I’m sorry their begging on camera for help really pisses you off! When you lose everything you own, I know you will handle it with more grace and aplomb. In the meantime, thank you for voting for George W. Bush. In no way, do I think you are a worthless dumbass because you voted for that cock-eyed SOB.
My last little rant for today is this: politicians must stop saying that the blame game must stop. You fucked up. Own up to it. Accept it, admit it, and start acting like a leader, W.
Today at work, I was telling one of my pals the news about my family, when my boss walked in. He’s not the most well-liked person in the place. In fact, I’ve heard more than one person say that they loathe him. In the last week, he’s never once asked me if there is any word on my family. When he walked into the middle of the conversation, he actually had the audacity to quip, “maybe he’s at Ellen DeGeneres’ sister house.” I didn’t laugh. My pal didn’t laugh. He changed the subject to something work related and I walked out of the room. Later, I saw him in the hall and gave him my best evil eye. It was a waste of an evil eye. He was too self-absorbed to notice. HJ, a good person whom everyone loves, is missing, maybe dead. My boss, who looks like a chickpea with legs and has the personality of a rattlesnake, is A okay. Universe, what happened to Karma?
I’m really stunned by how many people there are out there who just don’t care about this crisis. Fortunately, they are in the minority.
The other small faction of people I find appalling are the one I’ve talked to recently who are criticizing the black people who were stranded in New Orleans. I’m sorry their begging on camera for help really pisses you off! When you lose everything you own, I know you will handle it with more grace and aplomb. In the meantime, thank you for voting for George W. Bush. In no way, do I think you are a worthless dumbass because you voted for that cock-eyed SOB.
My last little rant for today is this: politicians must stop saying that the blame game must stop. You fucked up. Own up to it. Accept it, admit it, and start acting like a leader, W.
September 05, 2005
Pets Are Also Victims of Katrina
There are so many stories about what happened in New Orleans this past week that just break my heart, but the stories aboutabandoned pets send me running for the Jack Daniels and Prozac.
Maybe because I’m hopelessly in love with my cat, Sammy Davis, Jr., and I can identify with all those poor people down there who had to leave their animals behind. Look, no one loves their dogs like Southerners. It’s one of those clichés that happen to be true. If you don’t have a pet, this may seem trivial to you, but believe me, if you’ve got an animal you love, you’d just as soon die than harm it.
I read about one lady who has fifteen cats and refused to be rescued unless the kitties came with her. Now, a woman with fifteen cats conjures up all sorts of clichés about eccentric spinsters, but hell, I’m with her. I can only imagine that I wouldn’t leave if Sammy couldn’t go. Of course, I have the luxury of not having lived through what these folks did, so hooey on me.
If you have a cat or dog, feed it a little extra food tonight, let it in bed with you and hold it tight like it’s the love of your life. There’s no human out there who will give you the same kind of unconditional love. Why is that? Hell, because you’re human and ultimately, you are going to piss a loved one off big time, and humans aren’t always forgiving. So love that pet with all your might, start paying a little more attention to it because he or she won’t be around forever. And if you don’t have a pet, now is a good time to adopt.
Maybe because I’m hopelessly in love with my cat, Sammy Davis, Jr., and I can identify with all those poor people down there who had to leave their animals behind. Look, no one loves their dogs like Southerners. It’s one of those clichés that happen to be true. If you don’t have a pet, this may seem trivial to you, but believe me, if you’ve got an animal you love, you’d just as soon die than harm it.
I read about one lady who has fifteen cats and refused to be rescued unless the kitties came with her. Now, a woman with fifteen cats conjures up all sorts of clichés about eccentric spinsters, but hell, I’m with her. I can only imagine that I wouldn’t leave if Sammy couldn’t go. Of course, I have the luxury of not having lived through what these folks did, so hooey on me.
If you have a cat or dog, feed it a little extra food tonight, let it in bed with you and hold it tight like it’s the love of your life. There’s no human out there who will give you the same kind of unconditional love. Why is that? Hell, because you’re human and ultimately, you are going to piss a loved one off big time, and humans aren’t always forgiving. So love that pet with all your might, start paying a little more attention to it because he or she won’t be around forever. And if you don’t have a pet, now is a good time to adopt.
September 04, 2005
Missing: 9 Happy People
I have at least 9 members of my family missing in New Orleans. I don’t know if they are dead or getting drunk in some roadhouse in Ruston, LA. They are happy, joyous people who see a hurricane as an opportunity to overeat, like, say, Tuesday is an opportunity to overeat. And everyday is always an excuse to drink way too much. They are not alcoholics, just because they are from Nola. At least they don’t believe they are, and neither do I. They know that life is short, and therefore, we might as well drink to Brevity, because Brevity is what kills you. Not Hurricanes. The point is, not one member of the family who can be accounted for can contact them. The missing either don’t have cell phones, or, if they do, we can’t get through. They are not Internet savvy. The Internet is for busy people, not people of leisure, who are busy enjoying life. This is my family. The normal rules that apply to most Americans do not apply to my Nola relatives. This is one reason those of us who don’t live in Nola can’t find them. Oddly, we are not panicked. We understand. Shit happens.
They may be dead. I can’t tell you. What I can tell is that if they didn’t leave Nola before Katrina, it’s not because they are stupid as some might say. It’s because they are true, native, New Orleans folk. Their rules are different than yours. Their values are different. What matters to them is trivial to you. They are about family, togetherness, good times. Happy memories. They’ve been there and drank to that, while you and me were on Prozac and in therapy, they were just dealing. Their lives may be destroyed, but, hell, that’s life. Ain’t nothing to cry about for sure.
Have you ever met a Southerner from that part of the world? Did it mystify you, after you got to know them really well, after they shared their darkest secret with you and you with them, that, no matter how well educated you were, no matter how much of the world you had seen, that the opinions that mattered most to them were those of their family, people who most likely never ventured farther than Baton Rouge?
I’m from the South, from the Mississippi/Louisiana region, and it has mystified me. Until now. Now that I am missing 9 family members who suddenly matter to me. It’s not that we are close. It’s not that I have shared happy memory after happy memory with them. It’s that they are people I’ve laughed with, who I’ve argued with, who I’ve loved from afar. In the privileged times I’ve been in their presence, I’ve always known that they seem to have life prioritized properly. What matters? That you are in the company of those you love. That you are not judged by those you love. That you are always, thinking foremost not of the hardship, but of the survival of the hardship. My family always speaks of the past, the rough times, the stupid mistakes, the downtrodden times. The theme is always the same. They got through it with people who stuck by them.
I know you love your family. I know they are good to you (or maybe not, it's sadly not always a given). Let's say that they are wonderful folks. Let me ask you this, do they celebrate just because it is Wednesday? Or that David Duke got defeated? Or that you’ve come for a visit, a relative they barely know because you are a third cousin and you’ve never lived in New Orleans. Well, that’s how these people are. I didn’t appreciate them properly before, but I appreciate the shit out of them now, now that I think of just how good they’ve been to me when I showed up in Nola unannounced. They always invite me over, a party ready. The last time this happened was 1998. My cousin HJ served pink wine out of a box and I, the snob, declined, drinking tap water instead. He admired me for my discipline. If only he knew, and maybe he did, that I considered pink jug wine beneath me, when the real honor was right there in front of me, in flesh and blood. He showed me Mardis Gras memorbillia. “Here’s my daugher, Queen of our Krew.” “Here’s a photo of me, throwing beads to the crowd.” “You want my Krew recipe for Gumbo?”
They have guts and spirit while I have an okay education, and a skill for good wine. They’ve never missed an opportunity to laugh, while I’ve never missed an opportunity to be enraged at our Government (yawn).
I’ve neglected them because they weren’t that we didn't have that much in common. They were entrenched in a city; I was entrenched in the world (right). But I always kney they were people with gumption and audacity. And even though they are missing at the moment, I believe they are alive, giving FEMA hell in Baton Rouge or Houston or god knows where. In my fantasy, they are telling W that he is cock-eyed, and that laser surgery can remedy that, and by the way, did you have to give up drinking cold-turkey, couldn’t you just learn to control yourself. If our cousin Randall could, it seems a boy like you could do, too. What’s the matter with you boy? Is it because you are actually a Yankee, born in Connecticut and not Texas? That would explain a whole lot, son.
But this is me, the snob, imposing my fantasy on them, when in reality it wouldn’t matter to them that W was President. He is just another fellow in need of some serious good food and a damn good time.
Folks, I don’t know where you are tonight, but I hope you are well. And good luck willing, we will see each other soon, and I will be better family to you than I have in the past. Hell, I'll even bring the pink jug wine.
They may be dead. I can’t tell you. What I can tell is that if they didn’t leave Nola before Katrina, it’s not because they are stupid as some might say. It’s because they are true, native, New Orleans folk. Their rules are different than yours. Their values are different. What matters to them is trivial to you. They are about family, togetherness, good times. Happy memories. They’ve been there and drank to that, while you and me were on Prozac and in therapy, they were just dealing. Their lives may be destroyed, but, hell, that’s life. Ain’t nothing to cry about for sure.
Have you ever met a Southerner from that part of the world? Did it mystify you, after you got to know them really well, after they shared their darkest secret with you and you with them, that, no matter how well educated you were, no matter how much of the world you had seen, that the opinions that mattered most to them were those of their family, people who most likely never ventured farther than Baton Rouge?
I’m from the South, from the Mississippi/Louisiana region, and it has mystified me. Until now. Now that I am missing 9 family members who suddenly matter to me. It’s not that we are close. It’s not that I have shared happy memory after happy memory with them. It’s that they are people I’ve laughed with, who I’ve argued with, who I’ve loved from afar. In the privileged times I’ve been in their presence, I’ve always known that they seem to have life prioritized properly. What matters? That you are in the company of those you love. That you are not judged by those you love. That you are always, thinking foremost not of the hardship, but of the survival of the hardship. My family always speaks of the past, the rough times, the stupid mistakes, the downtrodden times. The theme is always the same. They got through it with people who stuck by them.
I know you love your family. I know they are good to you (or maybe not, it's sadly not always a given). Let's say that they are wonderful folks. Let me ask you this, do they celebrate just because it is Wednesday? Or that David Duke got defeated? Or that you’ve come for a visit, a relative they barely know because you are a third cousin and you’ve never lived in New Orleans. Well, that’s how these people are. I didn’t appreciate them properly before, but I appreciate the shit out of them now, now that I think of just how good they’ve been to me when I showed up in Nola unannounced. They always invite me over, a party ready. The last time this happened was 1998. My cousin HJ served pink wine out of a box and I, the snob, declined, drinking tap water instead. He admired me for my discipline. If only he knew, and maybe he did, that I considered pink jug wine beneath me, when the real honor was right there in front of me, in flesh and blood. He showed me Mardis Gras memorbillia. “Here’s my daugher, Queen of our Krew.” “Here’s a photo of me, throwing beads to the crowd.” “You want my Krew recipe for Gumbo?”
They have guts and spirit while I have an okay education, and a skill for good wine. They’ve never missed an opportunity to laugh, while I’ve never missed an opportunity to be enraged at our Government (yawn).
I’ve neglected them because they weren’t that we didn't have that much in common. They were entrenched in a city; I was entrenched in the world (right). But I always kney they were people with gumption and audacity. And even though they are missing at the moment, I believe they are alive, giving FEMA hell in Baton Rouge or Houston or god knows where. In my fantasy, they are telling W that he is cock-eyed, and that laser surgery can remedy that, and by the way, did you have to give up drinking cold-turkey, couldn’t you just learn to control yourself. If our cousin Randall could, it seems a boy like you could do, too. What’s the matter with you boy? Is it because you are actually a Yankee, born in Connecticut and not Texas? That would explain a whole lot, son.
But this is me, the snob, imposing my fantasy on them, when in reality it wouldn’t matter to them that W was President. He is just another fellow in need of some serious good food and a damn good time.
Folks, I don’t know where you are tonight, but I hope you are well. And good luck willing, we will see each other soon, and I will be better family to you than I have in the past. Hell, I'll even bring the pink jug wine.
September 03, 2005
Clinton Blows Opportunity
In case anyone out there thinks I won’t skewer democrats, I’m about to take aim at the big Kahuna. I’m disappointed in former President Clinton. When CCN asked him if he thought federal relief was slow, he said, “You and I are not in a position to make any judgment because we weren’t there.” A simple “Yes,” would have been fine, President Clinton. Even if you had said, “Yes, but . . .”
The comments posted on Arriana Huffington’s site to this blog are quite interesting. Most people defended Clinton. Maybe they are staunch Republicans who will never admit our Government, particularly the current one, can make a mistake. Relief could have come quicker. They knew this might happen. They knew it. Why weren’t they prepared? Someone should be fired or impeached, and there are still people out there in this country who just don’t care.
And speaking of that, where’s Jimmy Carter in all this? Will no one but bloggers stand up to Bush? I guess there really are no political heros.
The comments posted on Arriana Huffington’s site to this blog are quite interesting. Most people defended Clinton. Maybe they are staunch Republicans who will never admit our Government, particularly the current one, can make a mistake. Relief could have come quicker. They knew this might happen. They knew it. Why weren’t they prepared? Someone should be fired or impeached, and there are still people out there in this country who just don’t care.
And speaking of that, where’s Jimmy Carter in all this? Will no one but bloggers stand up to Bush? I guess there really are no political heros.
September 02, 2005
Michael Moore Writes W
I found this on alternet.org
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina, and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted.
Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do, like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then, but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there, done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore
P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina, and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted.
Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do, like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then, but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there, done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore
P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.
W is So Obvious
Today’s debriefing was clearly nothing more than a photo-op and, uh-hum, Republicans politicizing Katrina. And they say the liberals are politicizing the disaster? Well I guess what’s good for the goose . . .
Note to every politician in the world: stop rolling up your shirt sleeves to symbolize you are “gettin' down to bizness.” W looked like the jackass he is with his shirt sleeves rolled up. Please. We get the message. You are there to help. Trouble is, you didn't do diddly. You visit some stranded folks and you have no water or food, but hey, if they want a photo with you, they are in luck!
The whole t debriefing, and his statements afterwards, were just an insult to the disaster victims. By the way, I loved it when he said the “disaster area was a disaster.” Yes, that helps cement the argument that W must be smart because he did better than Kerry or Gore in college.
Back to the debriefing: W clearly was not paying attention to anything any one said. You could tell he was day-dreaming. His shifty-eyes kept wandering and his face was all screwed up like Rove taught him to do. I can imagine him thinking, “I wonder why Karl rolled up my shirt sleeves after he burped me?”
As a marketing person, I take today’s attempt at whatever-that-was as a slap in the face to the profession. It was a strained, obvious attempt at PR and damage control. The fact is, Bush is four days late and billions of dollars too short. And how dare he say that he is not satisfied with some of the relief efforts. Sugar, take some responsibility. The fish spoils from the head down. You know what I do to people on my staff who don’t own up to their responsibility? I fire them. God, W, I wish I could fire your redneck ass and ship you off to France where they would lynch you with bottles of wine.
Note to every politician in the world: stop rolling up your shirt sleeves to symbolize you are “gettin' down to bizness.” W looked like the jackass he is with his shirt sleeves rolled up. Please. We get the message. You are there to help. Trouble is, you didn't do diddly. You visit some stranded folks and you have no water or food, but hey, if they want a photo with you, they are in luck!
The whole t debriefing, and his statements afterwards, were just an insult to the disaster victims. By the way, I loved it when he said the “disaster area was a disaster.” Yes, that helps cement the argument that W must be smart because he did better than Kerry or Gore in college.
Back to the debriefing: W clearly was not paying attention to anything any one said. You could tell he was day-dreaming. His shifty-eyes kept wandering and his face was all screwed up like Rove taught him to do. I can imagine him thinking, “I wonder why Karl rolled up my shirt sleeves after he burped me?”
As a marketing person, I take today’s attempt at whatever-that-was as a slap in the face to the profession. It was a strained, obvious attempt at PR and damage control. The fact is, Bush is four days late and billions of dollars too short. And how dare he say that he is not satisfied with some of the relief efforts. Sugar, take some responsibility. The fish spoils from the head down. You know what I do to people on my staff who don’t own up to their responsibility? I fire them. God, W, I wish I could fire your redneck ass and ship you off to France where they would lynch you with bottles of wine.
September 01, 2005
Pets Need Help, Too
Don't forget the animals who are stranded in the disaster areas. Visit
http://www.bestfriends.org/ to see what you can do.
If you can, please donate to both the Red Cross, or some similar organization, for the human relief effort, and to any animal shelter working to save the pets in Nola or Mississippi.
http://www.bestfriends.org/ to see what you can do.
If you can, please donate to both the Red Cross, or some similar organization, for the human relief effort, and to any animal shelter working to save the pets in Nola or Mississippi.
Politicize This
I am so tired of the Right complaining that the Left is politicizing Katrina. At least the Left is THINKING about Katrina. So new rule: anyone who says the Left is politicizing Katrina is a jackass. What they call politicizing, actual patriots call CRITISIZING OUR GOVERNMENT when they do wrong, because, hey, jackasses, that’s our right. That’s why it’s America and not Iran. So at the risk of politicizing against that poor noble hero, W (bite me), here’s a good story my favorite former boss sent me on how, among other things, W and his mighty minions cut flood control funding to Nola by 44% to help pay for the war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, speaking of closet lesbians, Condi Rice went shoe shopping today at Ferragamo. Last night, she needed to get out of the hotel and have a giggle so she went to see Spamalot. I have it on good authority that afterwards, she asked to meet the cast, and they said, No way, that would be inappropriate. You’re the face of the Government, go help out W.
Hey Condi, do the new Ferragamos feel good on your feet? I mean, after working on your backhand with Monica Seles, I bet your dogs are tired. By the way, there are women being raped in the Superdome. Now back to your Ferragamos . . .
As Ironhuff said on the phone to me today as we discussed the W administrations' blatant apathy about New Orleans, “It’s a classic case of ‘Let Them Eat Cake.’”
Meanwhile, speaking of closet lesbians, Condi Rice went shoe shopping today at Ferragamo. Last night, she needed to get out of the hotel and have a giggle so she went to see Spamalot. I have it on good authority that afterwards, she asked to meet the cast, and they said, No way, that would be inappropriate. You’re the face of the Government, go help out W.
Hey Condi, do the new Ferragamos feel good on your feet? I mean, after working on your backhand with Monica Seles, I bet your dogs are tired. By the way, there are women being raped in the Superdome. Now back to your Ferragamos . . .
As Ironhuff said on the phone to me today as we discussed the W administrations' blatant apathy about New Orleans, “It’s a classic case of ‘Let Them Eat Cake.’”
Waiting for W
I've heard a lot of people complain about the lack of W's involvement and his apparent apathy for what's going on in Louisiana and Mississippi right now. Someone said to me the other day, "Why isn't he down here?" to which I responded, "Why, so he could screw things up even more?" Another friend of mine sent me this editorial from the NYT, which I think elegantly hits the nail right on the head.
We have a president who doesn’t care, and who actually has the nerve to say that this disaster will make us stronger as a country. No, W, that’s how out of touch with reality you are. Disasters like this take something out of you. There are going to be plenty of people for a long time coming who will be haunted by what has happened. Not that you have the capacity to care or understand.
I need to take a moment to skewer more than just George W. Bush. I expect this kind of loathsome behavior from him. He’s completely without merit. What is distressing to me is the apathy of the people I talk to on a daily basis. No one seems to care what’s going on in New Orleans or the Gulf Coast. They live their everyday bland lives, not giving a second thought about what it means to lose everything, and I mean, every single thing, and be faced with months of uncertainty, knowing you have to begin again from scratch. Can you imagine not knowing where your neighbors are or if they are alive, or your friends, or family? And what about all the pets that were left behind? If I had to leave my cat behind in a disaster, well, I wouldn’t. I would be lugging Sammy Davis, Jr. (my cat, not the deceased star) all over the place with me.
Throughout the day, I’m reminding people I know and work with that there are a lot of folks in our own backyard with some real problems. So I’m sorry if your work day is stressful, or if you have too much on your desk. At least you have a job and your boring existence has gone uninterrupted. For once, you have something to be grateful for.
We have a president who doesn’t care, and who actually has the nerve to say that this disaster will make us stronger as a country. No, W, that’s how out of touch with reality you are. Disasters like this take something out of you. There are going to be plenty of people for a long time coming who will be haunted by what has happened. Not that you have the capacity to care or understand.
I need to take a moment to skewer more than just George W. Bush. I expect this kind of loathsome behavior from him. He’s completely without merit. What is distressing to me is the apathy of the people I talk to on a daily basis. No one seems to care what’s going on in New Orleans or the Gulf Coast. They live their everyday bland lives, not giving a second thought about what it means to lose everything, and I mean, every single thing, and be faced with months of uncertainty, knowing you have to begin again from scratch. Can you imagine not knowing where your neighbors are or if they are alive, or your friends, or family? And what about all the pets that were left behind? If I had to leave my cat behind in a disaster, well, I wouldn’t. I would be lugging Sammy Davis, Jr. (my cat, not the deceased star) all over the place with me.
Throughout the day, I’m reminding people I know and work with that there are a lot of folks in our own backyard with some real problems. So I’m sorry if your work day is stressful, or if you have too much on your desk. At least you have a job and your boring existence has gone uninterrupted. For once, you have something to be grateful for.
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