Another to add to the list.

Maureen Dowd's perfectly worded Op-Ed in the New York Times uses the recent disaster in Louisiana (and the even more disastrous White House fumbling) as a means to expose Bush's staggering incompetence, arrogance, stupidity, and racist condescension. Although the entire piece is great, this passage really sums it up:

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

This is not a question of partisan politics; Americans are homeless and starving because Bush doesn't give a crap about poor people (although he's waxed nostalgic about the destroyed saloons of New Orleans, as he's pointed out in a recent interview); because human lives are being lost because our senseless war in Iraq is sucking our treasury dry and wasting the lives of the good men and women who volunteer to defend our country. This is the man we've elected to represent our nation - someone who has both the intellect and the blind loyalty of a partisan golden retriever.


»Article (NY Times)