Baghdad Bush Returns

Good to know that in the wake of natural disaster, bipartisan criticism, and plummeting favorables in the opinion polls, the president still isn’t afraid to make an utterly stupid decision.

Mr Bush decided today that he won’t raise any taxes in order to help pay for the reconstruction and relief efforts the Gulf Coast and that instead he’ll just continue to cut programs. I’m not a professional prognosticator or anything, but I’m willing to bet just about any sum that you put in front of me, those programs are going to be things like education, health promotion and low-level civic safety programs. In other words, the very same programs that would have gone to assisting victims of national disasters.

I have something of a background in psychology, so I know a little something about the Oedipus complex. While I understand a child’s desire to overthrow his father figuratively, if not literally, doesn’t this seem to be a strange twist on it all? I can just hear the current Bush administration in their meeting with each other starting out all conversations with “Now remember: none of our statements can start with the phrase ‘read my lips…’.”

The president also stated that Congress was just going to have to find a way to make this all work and that they would just have to figure out a budget that didn’t involve taxing anyone, which to me sounds a little like a surgeon saying that the triple by-pass is going to have to performed by the intern. In other hospital. Three cities away.

In other laughable news, Mr Bush’s assistant for economic policy also assured the American people that despite the estimated $62 billion needed for Gulf Coast assistance, the needed funding will in no way dampen the president’s plan to have the deficit cut completely in half by 2009. Don’t you just love the end-date? Perfectly timed so that if the deficit isn’t cut in half by that time, it will be one year into the next president’s term, thus assuring plausible deniability on behalf of Mssrs. Bush, Cheney et al.

Finally, somewhat tangentially but still within the realm of the important, the government has decided that it won’t be allowing reporters to ride along with them while search and rescue crews find bodies in the Katrina aftermath. So much for embedded journalism. Apparently it’s fine for journalists to view carnage when the administration looks like its fighting a noble, valiant war but not when it has to clean up after itself. Wouldn’t want the public seeing that.

What's the take-away message here? To all you good people of the Gulf Coast: Don't call us, we'll call you. You thought your government failed you before August 28th? I'm sorry to say its just outdone itself.

I don't normally put these things on here, but...

I am: 0% Republican.

"You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)"

Are You A Republican?


What can I say? vive la revolucion!

I Want What I Need

Just when it didn’t look like this whole mess could get any worse…

The Washington Post reported today that despite the president’s photo-op tours of a decimated Mississippi and Louisiana, it looks like Mr Bush himself was campaigning not too long ago against giving money to the very agencies and organizations that could have helped to prevent or at least lesson the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

Among other measures, the president has in recent years fought to slice the budget for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ attempts to improve the levees in New Orleans. In 2005, Bush asked for only $3.9 million for funding, reportedly only a fraction of the total amount requested by the corps. Since coming to office he has frozen their spending and in July of this year (yes, just two months ago) tried to block a plan to spend $1 billion over four years to rebuild coastlands and wetlands, nature’s way of protecting against hurricanes.

The question that you are probably asking yourself right now, and rightly so, is why in the world am I bringing this up? Isn’t this a time for banding together and putting politics aside? 500,000 people are suffering directly as the result of a natural disaster, the aftermath of which America has not yet seen in its history and all I want to do it bitch about the president?

Well, actually, yes. Let me tell you why:

First off, I have to say that I believe that Mr Bush is indeed shocked and worried by the damage done. I don’t believe that the man is monster in any fashion. But while I believe his grief is genuine, I doubt his priorities and his ability to admit his mistakes. Granted, I don’t have to do a lot of work to doubt the latter, given that he himself has professed that he hasn’t made any mistakes, or at least very few, in the past five years. In any case, it is true that spending in Washington has been a little…ah…skewed of late.

To the point, it is also true that even if the Army Corps of Engineers had been funded fully in all its efforts over the past five years, there is a significant likelihood that this disaster would still have come to pass. Nothing that broke in the Gulf of Mexico was designed to take the force of a Category 5 hurricane. The administration obviously could not have had any clue this was coming and if it had certainly would not have hesitated to have put as much funding as was humanly possible into protecting the city of New Orleans, to say nothing of the people and towns surrounding the Gulf of Mexico that were also hit.

But that’s just the thing: as much as is humanly possible. A whole lot more would have been humanly possible if money in Washington had been spent in a way that made sense, rather than a way that kept a political pipe dream alive. For those who would like the lines drawn for them, I am, unfortunately, talking about Iraq.

I’m not going to get into the debate about whether or not troops should be pulled out of the country. (For the record, I think that at this point doing that would do more harm than good. More on that at some other time.) What I am going to point out is that Iraq has already cost the United States over $191 billion dollars. For those into money crunching, that means that with that money we could have built over 1 million new houses for the homeless, hired over 3 million new teachers, provided over 9 million students with college scholarships, and funded world-wide anti-hunger efforts for 7 years. All of which would have been attractive options, considering the number of hungry, homeless and displaced residents of New Orleans.

What Katrina should be illustrating is potentially very dire consequences of confusing desire with obligation and want with need. The country is being led by a team of people who are piloting us with the mindset of what they want to have and not paying attention to what the needs of their people and the people of the world are. Little children in the convenience store on the corner claim that they need to have a chocolate bar as a snack. Responsible parents know that they should question whether or not their child needs said snack or just wants it.

And, of course, I would offer to the political nay-sayer out there who suggests that I should just shut up and start caring about something other than politics, it was Mr Bush himself who beat me to the punch of making this political. When asked today if the country could afford to repair the damage, he responded “We’ll secure our country from the terrorists and we’ll rebuild this area.” He also described the damage as if “the entire Gulf coast was obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine.”

Nice image, eh? Sounds like someone “needs” us to believe something about spending.