What comes next? Worster? Worstest? Worstester? Worchestershire?
I had to turn off NPR on the way in to work today because I just couldn’t listen to one more story about someone who had lost everything and is now wandering flooded streets in fear of looters and armed gangs. Yes, I know, “turning off the news” is a luxury that people on the Gulf Coast don’t have.
I’ve been thinking more about what I wrote yesterday regarding the Bush administration, its role in the preparation (or lack thereof) for Katrina’s landfall, and its reaction thereto. Believe me, I would be wholeheartedly in favor of putting aside political differences in order to focus on helping the survivors recover, but at this point, I’m afraid that would be a stupid mistake.
Frankly, this whole thing smacks of 9/11. The President, on an extended vacation, receives warnings of imminent disaster. He makes some half-hearted efforts to prepare, but basically ignores the warnings and continues his vacation. Said disaster strikes and is exactly as bad as everyone had been predicting, the President spends two more days on vacation, then returns to Washington to begin his bumbling and delayed response. Calls go out from the conservative punditocracy that now is not the time for politics. This time around, we don’t even have to wait the months it will take for assorted investigations to find out the extent to which warning signs were ignored.
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded.” That was the President, yesterday on ABC. Apparently he missed, among other things, the extended series of Times-Picayune articles about exactly what could happen when a hurricane hit the city. Perhaps he and the Republicans in Congress missed the warnings while they were busy cutting funding to FEMA, more or less gutting the agency of its experienced personnel as they mashed it into their Frankenstein’s monster Department of Homeland Security.
My point in all this is that we’ve seen exactly how this administration handles this sort of crisis. They wage a nonstop war against government agencies and efforts that don’t fit their pet conservative theories, and then when disaster strikes and their theories blow up in their faces, they claim no one saw it coming, and that now is not the time for finger-pointing. Then they sweep it under the rug.
In the meantime, dead bodies are floating in the water, relief workers are coming under attack, tens of thousands of refugees are making their way to camps in Texas, and the news footage coming out of New Orleans is looking increasingly like what you’d expect from a third-world country.
The White House and its right-wing backers have spent their capital. They long ago squandered their right to the benefit of the doubt. Yes, now is the time to help the millions of people affected by the hurricane, but it also has to be the time to point fingers directly at the people responsible for the embarassing and reprehensible lack of preparation for the disaster and its aftermath.