Katrina One Year Later: ‘The George Bush Dog-and-Pony Show’

[Omaha Steve]

FULL article: http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/08/25/katrina-one-year-later-%e2%80%98the-george-bush-dog-and-pony-show%e2%80%99/

Katrina One Year Later: ‘The George Bush Dog-and-Pony Show’

Today, we launch the first in a series of profiles highlighting the experiences of Hurricane Katrina survivors—and exposing the gap between Bush administration spin and on-the-ground reality for the tens of thousands of survivors whose lives are still torn apart one year after the storm.

As the one-year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster approaches, some in the media have focused on New Orleans resident Rocky Vaccarella, who this week told President Bush he should have four more years in office.

But as Will Bunch on Attytood, Christy Hardin Smith on Firedoglake and others have written, Vaccarella’s appearance with Bush smells like the familiar smarmy sizzle of a White House PR campaign, this one swirling around the one-year anniversary of the Bush administration’s disaster relief debacle. Writes Bunch:

Turns out that the earthy Vaccarella—a highly successful businessman in the fast-food industry—is indeed a Republican pol, having run unsuccessfully under the GOP banner for a seat on the St. Bernard Parish commission back in 1999.

Shouldn’t the media be a tad more skeptical about events like these? And isn’t the fact that Vaccarella was once a Republican candidate for office a relevant fact that should be mentioned, to help viewers place his effusive, nationally televised praise in context.

Maybe reporters should instead talk with Vaccarella’s childhood friend and Chalmette High School classmate Rickey Fabra:

All George Bush has done so far is a dog-and-pony show. Nothing has been done. If we can go to a third-world country and tear down bombed out buildings and rebuild them, how come we don’t have that here? George Bush is just saying something to satisfy the public and doing nothing.

Fabra, president of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA) Local 60 in New Orleans, says he was one of the lucky survivors of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall last Aug. 29, killing more than 1,800 people and causing some $81 billion in damage as it moved across the Gulf Coast, with nearly 80 percent of New Orleans underwater.

[tanyev]

1. Why, it's as if the Bush team is trying to use tragedy for political gain.

That would be despicable.

[rodeodance]

2. i really wish these bloggers could be the headlines in the major news-

papers and news casts!