Reply #11: Katrina is the key to understanding Bush's evil [View All]

[HamdenRice]

Your excellent essay is about an important subject that we have to confront before we can make any progress impeaching or at least disempowering this administration -- namely, that most people still think that this administration is about as moral as any other administration, but just incompetent.

Whenever the subject of 9/11 comes up, one of the ways people dismiss LIHOP or MIHOP is to say, no president, not even this one, would kill 3000 Americans, even for geo-strategic reasons and the enrichment of the president's friends.

That argument might have held water until Katrina (forgive the pun). Katrina showed that Bush would allow 4,500 Americans to die not for some grand geo-strategic reason or to gain control of the world's oil, but simply so that Bush could continue to ride his bicycle. This was reported in as mainstream a news source as Newsweek. The only person who could coordinate all the branches of government to respond to Katrina simply wanted to continue his vacation and terrified his aides into not discussing Katrina until it became politically damaging.

The reason I blame those deaths on Bush is that when a similar hurricane and flooding that hit NOLA during the Johnson administration, fewer than 200 people died. According to a doctor friend of mine, in her estimation the majority of NOLA dead died of thirst, hunger, lack of medicine, exposure and secondary drowning (ie trying to escape or being stuck in flooded homes), etc., because no one bothered to rescue them or provide supplies for nearly a week. Imagine: hundreds of thousands of people in a sweltering 90 degree city, in the wake of a hurricane, without any clean water to drink for 7 days. That was a death sentence for thousands.

All so that Bush could ride his bicycle, eat cake and pretend to play the guitar. If he would let 4,500 die for a bicycle ride, why wouldn't he murder 3,000 to gain the world's biggest untapped reserves of oil and to steer hundreds of billions of dollars of contracts and pure theft to his friends and supporters?