fightingliberal Wrote:
I was initially one of those insensitive pricks who thought your kind of asking for it when you try to stick out a Category 4-5 Hurricane in a city below sea level, but then I considered the fact that most of the people stuck in NO are unbelievably poor and stuck in any city facing a natural disaster.
I gave some money to the Red Cross while purchasing some light bulbs today, so I'm starting to come around.
I was really amazed when Old Bullee stated that they weren't showing Saint Bernard due to floating corpses and then an hour later they finally started giving casualtie estimates in NO.
It sort of freaks me out that a major disaster has happened in late summer after Dubya has won a Presidential Election. In 2001, He was essentially on vacation until 9-11 and in 2005 his lengthy vacation is interrupted by a major hurricane that essentially wipes out another major city at least temporarily.
Anyways, I hope everyone down in that area either makes it out to a safer place or gets all the help they need.
But don't expect another post-disaster bounce for the President. His handling of this affair has been much less dexterous.
From
Political Animal:
"BUSH AND KATRINA....As Laura Rozen points out, even George Bush's defenders over at National Review think his reaction to Hurricane Katrina has been oddly detached from reality. I have to agree. While New Orleans was undergoing a slow motion catastrophe on Monday and Tuesday, Bush was mugging for the cameras, cutting a cake for John McCain, playing the guitar for Mark Wills, delivering an address about V-J day, and continuing with his vacation. Then, on Wednesday, when he finally got around to saying something, it turned out to be a flat, defensive, laundry list of a speech.
"These are not the actions of a president in touch with the country — especially a president who usually excels at reacting to tragedies like this. When you put this together with his increasingly robotic speeches about progress in Iraq, his tone deaf reaction to Cindy Sheehan's vigil, and the continuing meltdown in public support for the war, I think that for the first time in his presidency Bush has found himself in a corner he doesn't know how to get out of. And it's showing."