Bush’s Potemkin village presidency (Blumenthal)

[struggle4progress]

<snip>

Two disasters, one response

Just as the Iraq war was predicated on the distortion, falsification and suppression of intelligence, the administration’s preparation for Katrina was marked by the refusal to register information contrary to its prefabricated beliefs.

Bush’s censoring and dismissal of science on global warming helped lull him about the growing severity of hurricanes as a consequence. It was a possibility he did not want to know because it ran contrary to his dogmas. But his passivity extended to the eve of Katrina’s landfall, when Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center, briefed him by teleconference video about the likelihood that the raging storm would breach the levees of New Orleans.

Under Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) had been reorganised from a professionally proficient operation into a political dumping-ground, and since 2001 Fema had been studiously ignoring precise warnings of a potentially disastrous hurricane hitting New Orleans.

Before the invasion of Iraq, Bush refused to listen to senior military commanders that the light force poised for attack would be insufficient to secure the country under occupation. Then army chief of staff Eric Shinseki’s Senate testimony on the dangers of the Bush planning earned him a publicly humiliating rebuke from then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz (since rewarded by elevation to the presidency of the World Bank). <snip>

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/bush_2861.jsp

[whistle]

1. Cost is now at $250 billion and climbing, and Bush is promising

....a blank check to fix it all....do republicans, neo-conservatives and religious fundamentalists still believe the delusional ravings of this war-mongering dry-drunk cocaine-addicted fiend?