A lot of people are talking about how the back of the Bush administration has been broken by Katrina, how people are finally “seeing through” them, and so on. I don’t know; that seems like wishful thinking to me. This Katrina thing seems pretty typical for them, and heck, it’s not like they lied about weapons of mass destruction in New Orleans to trick the American people and Congress into approving a hurricane.
It’s horrible, but they’ve been involved in horrible things for a long time, and have been a lot more responsible for them. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Thousands and thousands of dead civilian Iraqis who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Abuses in Afghanistan. Extraordinary Rendition. Indefinite detention of Jose Padilla without charges.
If the American people reelected them besides all that, why should their failure to respond to the destuction of a major American city matter?
Because it’s an American city. Most of that stuff happened in foreign places, or to people spun as foreign/bent on our destruction. Mind, I agree, I’m not sure it’s going to make all that much of a difference. But even my mom, who generally sticks up for the government while saying you might have a point, even she said it was a problem. Granted, she said let’s startfrom the bottom up, which I actually sort of agree with, it didn’t seem like the state people knew what to do either. So she didn’t all out blame Bush, but hell, for her to say it was a problem is pretty big. This is the woman who, when I brought up torture and hammered her with it for a bit, responded “at least they still have their heads.” She also insisted I was “only seeing the bad stuff.”