You’re kidding, right?
Bush CREATED the DHS. He is, in fact, the one person in the entire world most at fault for its uselessness.
Not only that, but he crippled the competent, regional managers of FEMA by stuffing the agency headfirst into the additional 457 layers of bureaucracy at the DHS.
And the sad thing is that he won’t resign - it now appears Bush is going to toss Brown to the wolves, but that won’t save any of the lives lost. DoHS is now proven to be a joke and a waste of money. So much for confidence in the office of the Presidency.
I’ll suggest that the OP doesn’t go far enough – for the good of the country, Bush and Cheney should be incarcerated. Between the criminal negligence of Katrina and the snow-job of the Iraq war, you’ve got enough grounds for charges. At the very least, it’d demonstrate that no one is above the law in the United States.
Dennis Hastert? Mr. “Let’s just bulldoze New Orleans”? Oh dear. Blalron, perhaps you should rethink this.
(I learned something today, though: I always thought Bill Frist was in the line of succession. Imagine my relief when I looked that up and learned otherwise. Tempered somewhat by my horror at the fact the Michael Chertoff is in that line, and there’s pending legislation to move him up to #8…)
For Bush to resign, he would have to demonstrate things we have yet to see from him as Commander-in-Chief: humility, self-awareness, willingness to take responsbility, an ability to admit mistakes.
I’ve disliked his policies, his smirking demeanor, and his casual relationship with the truth since he first ran for POTUS.
But I always gave people the benefit of the doubt about his intelligence and savvy. Calling him an idiot seemed too glib, too easy; doing so just resorted to hyperbole to reflect a political landscape I was personally unsatisfied with. After all, his success and advancement suggested that he had a brain, though it applied itself to goals and priorities I disagreed with.
But now, I honestly do think that Bush is stupid–an arrogant incompetent who is as bad a manager as he is a judge of character. The former is evident in his valuing loyalty over honesty, integrity and experience, the latter because he seems to actually believe the lies, distortions, and half-truths that come from the people who he trusts the most.
I love my country, and I think it’s going to continue to suffer as long as he’s in office (at this point, I would take Cheney any day).
January 2008 seems like a lifetime away. 
Given the events of the last two weeks, I honestly believe that I will never see a worse President in my lifetime.
For all of you people who are trying to give Bush all the “blame” for creating the Department of Homeland Security and bogging it down into beauracracy, I have some more people you can blame:
Blame Lieberman too
Blame the Democrats too
Which doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing. Also, I think the OP point was precisely that some didn’t survive this one.
No problem, that dumbass is like, practically an honorary republican anyway.
Yes, but part of that is because they lived in a city that’s below sea level, surrounded by water, in a hurricane pathway, with waterwalls that had been neglected since the Reagan administration and an evacuation plan that wasn’t followed. There’s no doubt that FEMA’s response to this hasn’t been the best, but there are a lot more factors than that.
So not everything is Bush’s fault? Bush isn’t completely to blame for the creation of DHS?
Would you mind telling several posters in this thread that? Miller, RickJay, and jayjay all seem eager to pin the creation of DHS solely on Bush.
It was probably 48 hours after Katrina made landfall that I first heard the Levee argument. Bush had cut funding to rebuilding the levees and they broke.
It was before that that the Federal response was being criticized, laid directly at Bush’s feet. Bush was ignorant and unprepared. He doesn’t care about black people. He should resign. He is incompetant. He destroyed Fema.
You may take your pick of these arguments or add to them.
I am not really interested in debating the merits or the lack thereof to any of these viewpoints. Most of them have their own threads. If you would like to debate Bush and the Federal and State and local governments and the competance of their responses, I would appreciate it, if you did it in another thread.
What I would like to debate is the following:
In the wake of the worst natural disaster to befall this country in modern times, the initial response made by some was to immediately start googling about levees and Fema or what have you, and try to find some way to point a finger and lay the blame at Bush’s feet.
Now, I fully do understand that the response needs to be analyzed and criticized and blame should be placed where it is merited. What I question is the timimg. I don’t think we are yet at the time where we should be worrying about this. We should be worrying about saving lives and easing pain and discomfort. A month from now we will be in a position to turn our eyes in a manner where we can begin to understand what happened, what and who failed and how.
People however, do demonstrate their priorities by their actions. I think that it is self-evident that someone who immediately begins applying their energies towards blaming Bush in the wake of a disaster has revealed their priorities.
I submit to you that the person who’s priority is to place blame and criticize the administration is actually the person who is callous. It takes a tremendous and willful apathy to turn one’s eye from the suffering and disaster and begin to use it for political advantage, to argue about blame or whether we should call victims “refugees” or not. This should not be about politics, at least not yet.
I think that it is self-evident that those who choose to use this disaster to make the argument that Bush doesn’t care about black people, or Bush doesn’t care about poor people, or that Bush is incompetant… reveal themselves to truly and inarguably be the ones who are insensitive to suffering.
Again, these criticisms may or may not be without merit. I merely say that the priorities are skewed if this is what you care about.
Me? I just figured this out today. Tomorrow I’m donating time, supplies of clothing, toiletries, and paint and the use of my front end loader (with me to pilot it) towards helping prepare an old nursing home for receiving some evacuees.
Let me say this: only one President has ever resigned, and that after damning evidence came to light that he had attempted to subvert the Presidential election which re-elected him. Only two Presidents have ever been impeached, in each case because Republicans found a pretext to try to get rid of someone whose policies htey disliked.
I was in favor of Mr. Nixon’s being removed from office, and rejoiced at his resignation. I was opposed to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment, as I felt that what he had done was not the “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which the impeachment remedy was intended.
While I find Mr. Bush’s policies generally repellent, I do not think there are grounds to call for his impeachment or resignation.
I do not doubt it.
Isn’t it highly likely that some people were painfully aware of the situation even before it happened. People like those working on the levees in New Orleans, those who knew the budget circumstances for the project, those living in the shadow of the levees or those who make a living investigating and writing about it. Or people who had quit FEMA because of their first-hand experience of the incompetence of FEMA managers. Some people didn’t have to google, I’m sure. Some people simply turned to their spouse and said, “I goddamn told you this would happen.” It sucks to have a left-wing infrastructure in place to hear and relay this information quickly, doesn’t it?
Gee, we shouldn’t play the blame game or finger-point? What a novel assertion! Let us wait until the conservatives tell us its okay to point out the obvious. Of course, it is the critics who are most responsible for delaying the delivery of food and water and helping with the recovery.
False dichotomy. One can criticize and donate without either action limiting the other. One can criticize and drive to New Orleans. One can criticize and help organize net-based relief efforts. I could charge you with having the wrong priorities spending your time apologizing for the Bush administration or criticizing the critics. Folks were jumping to Bush’s defense with amazing speed as well. Are their priorities equally suspect?
Again, it is taking you time and effort to write this very paragraph, yet there are people still suffering. Your observation applies equally well to those trying to delay others from making reasonable comments about the horrid way that Bush managed this circumstance.
I didn’t and don’t, and while I find the OP’s hyperbole annoying, I don’t disagree with his proffered solution, albeit for slightly different reasons.
Just to follow up on my point above, here is an article I have cited from before in other threads, from one year ago. It discusses the Bush administration’s mishandling of FEMA. It is entitled “Disaster in the Making”. My point again is that it is not likely that someone rushed to google to assemble a bunch of data points into some kind of post hoc Bush bash. People were already talking about it a year ago.
Well yes, and as a former multi-year resident of NOLA I can tell you that it was in fact the case back in the 1980s. By all appearances it had been that way back in the 1970s and before. Everybody knew NOLA was in big trouble if a big one hit directly. Why don’t you blame Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, and Dubya. Why don’t you blame all the mayors and governors and state legislators. You do know that in the five years Bush has been Pres more money has been spent on repairing the levees than in the previous 8 under Clinton.
It is simply illogical and stupid to attempt to lay this disaster at Bush’s feet.
Well, in the interests of accuracy, as a point of fact, yes. The decision to not allow the Red Cross in to NOLA was a state one, not a Federal one. Nagin, a very harsh critic of the Federal government from square one, along with the Governor of Louisiana made the decision not to bring food into the Convention Center or the Superdome since it was to be a point of evacuation rather than a long term shelter. So, what you say is, literally, true.
It’s not a false dichotomy. While what you say is true, it is nonetheless very difficult and in most circumstances effort expended in one area limits that available in another.
Yes, I suppose they are. The better thing to do is to ignore wasted effort and ensure that your efforts are positive. In this particular instance though, I think it is valuable and positive to point out the wasted effort and convince people that it is a waste. Doing so, can cause people to change and do something positive that wouldn’t otherwise get done.
Personally, I’m not interested in apologizing for Bush. I think he has done things wrong. It is not an apology to point out that a charge like racism is stupid. If the charge is without merits, pointing out the fallacy of the argument isn’t an apology.
[quote[Again, it is taking you time and effort to write this very paragraph, yet there are people still suffering. Your observation applies equally well to those trying to delay others from making reasonable comments about the horrid way that Bush managed this circumstance.[/QUOTE]
Yes, but by taking the time, it is my hope that I will generate a positive outcome and a net gain in positive effort. I find your criticism somewhat empty though as you fail to take into account or even acknowledge my next paragraph.
I don’t blame him for the hurricane. Nor do I even blame him for the levees breaking. What I do blame him for the lack of response for the first several days after the disaster.
Do you personally believe that he did the best he could during that time? Was he busting his ass to get aid to people who needed it? If he did play an active role, what exactly did his schedule look like during the days after the hurricane but before he left his vacation? I realize that the Republican controlled Congress wouldn’t have the balls to try to subpoena his schedule and if they did Bush would hide behind “Executive Privilege” to avoid answering the question. But do you actually believe Bush’s response was adequate during the time that people were huddled inside the superdome with no water, functioning bathrooms, or food?
Scylla, given the performance of the federal government over the last two weeks, do you believe the Bush administration is prepared to respond to the mayhem caused by another terrorist attack similar to 9-11?
I don’t think they are. If you have evidence that would convince me otherwise, please offer it.