Where Personal and Professional Life Collide...

WASHINGTON - In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

(from an AP article)


If we can't impeach the lying, blood-stained bastard, can we put him on trial for premeditated manslaughter? Please?

First:
Yes, damn it, I was in Manhattan for 9/11. So don't even think about playing that card. Ever.

Second:
From this morning's New York Times:


WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 - There was anger: David Vitter, Louisiana's freshman Republican senator, gave the federal government an F on Friday for its handling of the whirlwind after the storm. And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared, "We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died" amounted to "nothing more than poverty, age or skin color."

There was shock at the slow response: Joseph P. Riley Jr., the 29-year Democratic mayor of Charleston, S.C., and a veteran of Hurricane Hugo's wrath, said: "I knew in Charleston, looking at the Weather Channel, that Gulfport was going to be destroyed. I'm the mayor of Charleston, but I knew that!"

But perhaps most of all there was shame, a deep collective national disbelief that the world's sole remaining superpower could not - or at least had not - responded faster and more forcefully to a disaster that had been among its own government's worst-case possibilities for years.


read the rest before you try to tell me my anger is misplaced, or political, or anything other than what it is -- human and humane outrage at a leader who could not be bothered to do anything for the people he claimed to represent, until fingers started to point at him and cry 'shame, shame!'

No, it's not all Bush's fault. But he is the one who was visibly inactive, vocally clueless, and overall, at the end of the day, represents us to the world, no matter how much some of us may deplore that fact. Part of the job -- a large part of the job -- is to be lightning rod for critics, at home and abroad.

and apparently we not only have to deal with looters, but car-jackings and price gougers, too.


It's one thing to announce martial law. They have to be able to enforce it, too. I'm not sure you can, under these conditions.


*sadness for the entire country*




I'm going to go let the cats sleep on me for a while. Just a thought -- if everyone who has this journal friended were able to donate $5 to an emergency charity, that would be $1000 going to help out the survivors. If we passed that along down the LJ friends-chain... how much money could we raise?