Finger Pointing Starts With A Peek Behind The Curtain
This, excerpted from Blah3,
where poster “Stranger” gives a quick object lesson in the
lensing/focusing power of bloggers to aggregate and analyze faster than
you can say, “You sit on a throne of lies.”
The Potemkin Photo Op Saturday, September 03 2005 @ 09:40 PM Eastern Daylight Time Contributed by: Stranger
I
was tuning in and out of Bush's massive photo op on the Gulf Coast
yesterday, and everything at the time seemed just a little too pat for
me. From the 'briefing' that went on in a hangar full of helicopters to
his walking down a street in Biloxi and having three regular citizens
walk up to him for comforting to the last press availiability of the
day when he announced that the Convention Center was secure and the
levees were being repaired, it was clear that the game plan from the
White House was for Bush to go to the region, look decisive, comfort a
few citizens, and announce at the end of the day that all was well.
It was a full-on effort to change the subject of discussion
from the utter failure of the Bush administration to handle the crisis
with even a hint of competency, and in true Bush fashion, he wrapped it
up at 5:00 PM and announced that he was 'Flyin' out of (t)here.'
But from beginning to end, the entire exercise was a series of
lies - a Potemkin photo op designed to fool those Americans who were
not bothering to look closely at what was going on. Let's look at key
aspects of Bush's trip that were covered by television.
The Briefing:
There were a lot of questions asked yesterday morning about the phony
briefing that Bush got in that hangar, featuring a backdrop of Coast
Guard helicopters. People were wondering why those choppers were not
out picking up flood victims or delivering supplies. The reason why is
simple - Bush had the majority of helcopter traffic stopped while
Marine One was in the Gulf Coast region. The New Orleans Times-Picayune
reported this (Via AmericaBlog):
Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard
Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge
Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s
visit to New Orleans, officials said.
The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon,
D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in
the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana
five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said
Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.
“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these
folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let
helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.
The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors
after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.
This leaves me wondering how many people died while Bush was playing Decisive Leader.
The First 'Comforting Session':Then it was off to Biloxi, MS to
survey the damage. As Bush, Haley Barbour and others walked down a
street, 2 women appeared seemingly out of nowhere for Bush to 'comfort'
them. But it turns out that the two women didn't even live in
Biloxi, and had just come down for the day to try to 'salvage' clothes
from the area for one of the women's son (were they looters?). But they
were apparently reasonably telegenic and happened to be in the area, so
they were recruited to represent an area where they didn't even live. A
number of threads at Democratic Underground
discuss the weirdness of these women showing up in a disaster area. And
a trandcript of the conversation between Bush and the women reads like
a bad comedy skit:
Bush to women: "There's a Salvation Army center that I
want to, that I'll tell you where it is, and they'll get you some help.
I'm sorry.... They'll help you.....
Woman 1: "I came here looking for clothes..."
Bush: "They'll get you some clothes, at the Salvation Army center..."
Woman 1: "We don't have anything..."
Bush: "I understand.... Do you know where the center is, that I'm talking to you about?"
Guy with shades: "There's no center there, sir, it's a truck."
Bush: "There's trucks?"
Guy: "There's a school, a school about two miles away....."
Bush: "But isn't there a Salvation center down there?"
Guy: "No that's wiped out...."
Bush: "A temporary center? "
Guy: "No sir they've got a truck there, for food."
Bush: "That's what I'm saying, for food and water."
Bush turns to the sister who's been saying how she needs clothes.
Bush to sister: "You need food and water."
The 'Recovery Efforts':Wherever Bush went yesterday, it seemed
as though people were already hard at work rebuilding the affected
areas. Unfortunately for Bush, there were a few foreign journalists at
his photo ops, and they pulled back the curtain on what we saw on TV to
reveal that the 'work' was staged for the media. Here's a translation
from the German news show web site.
Christine Adelhardt live from Biloxi:
"Two minutes ago the President drove by with his convoy. What happened
here in Biloxi during the day is really unbelievable. All of a sudden
the rescue troops finally showed up, the clean-up vehicles; we didn't
see those over the last days here. In an area where it really isn't
urgent, there is nobody around, all the remaining people went to the
city center.
The President is traveling with a press convoy, so they get
wonderful pictures saying the president was here and the help will
follow. The amount of this catastrophe shocked me, but the amount of
set-up that happened here today is at least equally shocking for me.
And there's more, this time on the 'recovery efforts' in New Orleans, from War And Piece:
There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN
International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster
zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.
ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely
staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution
point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately
after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that
others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same
time.
The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.
This goes beyond stage management. This is criminal.
Levee Repairs in New Orleans: As Bush flew around the skies
above New Orleans, CNN began showing footage of a bulldozer and dump
trucks working on the 17th Street levee, which was the maqin source of
the flood waters in New Orleans. When Bush got ready to leave, he
crowed that 'progress is flowing.' But according to Sen. Mary Landrieu,
the crew that was working so hard yesterday left and apparently never
came back:
But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the
breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with
the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant
effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying
over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later,
it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage
set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed
resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of
equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and
the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young and old -
deserve far better from their national government.
Control of the Convention Center: Bush made a big deal of telling the nation
that the icon for unrest and chaos in New Orleans this week - the New
Orleans Convention Center - was secured by the time of his statement
yesterday.
I'm pleased to report, thanks to the good work of the
adjutant general from Louisiana and the troops that have been called in
that the convention center is secure.
CNN's Barbara Starr reports that there is "no
indication" the convention center in New Orleans is secure. She reports
there is still much unrest.
And the now-famous Fox News video of Geraldo Rivera inside the Convention Center showed how Bush's idea of 'securing' the center was locking the people in.
I'm almost worn out with anger reading about the decimation of FEMA under Bush's watch;
the pathetic lack of response to Katrina from the federal government;
the relentless television images of human degradation; and the endless
excuses from administration hacks pretending that nobody could have predicted Katrina's devastation.
I realize that it's no different from what's been happening in Iraq for
the past two years, but Iraq is 8,000 miles away and the truth is that
no matter how angry we are at what's going on there, it's to some
extent an intellectual anger. What's happening in New Orleans is like a
punch in the gut. Yeah, lets blame the victims.
The Condi Rice defense "Who could have imagined the leeves would
breech and flood the city", is being dropped as the White House Shifts
Blame to State and Local Officials. "Bush, who has been
criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed
response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put
responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government....In a
Washington briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said
one reason federal assets were not used more quickly was 'because our
constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state
with the governor.'"
I just don't understand how this jives with the press release on the Whitehouse's own website from Saturday, that claims - The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of
Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local
response efforts...
and The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland
Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all
disaster relief efforts...
and Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and
provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to
alleviate the impacts of the emergency...
What about the New Orleans disaster plan for hurricanes;
a.) the planning for evacuation was outsourced by FEMA to a private
entity that has pulled it off its website;
b.) 1/3 of the national
guard from louisiana is in iraq, not 20%, and even so, there weren't
enough national guardspeople available had the full complement been in
the state, and even so, the state did request assistance on august
28th, and even so states were prepared to provide assistance but the
paperwork didn't come through from dhs/fema, and even so, read what
marky said above: it's dhs's fricking mission to deal with this stuff;
c.) try and understand, if you can, that what happened was the
evacuation order went out and then the city was hit. there was no time
to get everyone out no matter what with local resources, which is why
the reports increasingly appearing about offers to help in various ways
matter so much when it comes to sorting out who fucked up.
Disaster Management 101: Disasters don't stop at political boundaries.
Disaster Management 102: The broader the base of resources for
mitigating and responding to disasters of this magnitute, the better.
Disaster Management 103: Those resources have to be effectively and efficiently coordinated, or you end up with a cluster-f*ck.
The Federal Government is the entity best capable of providing that
coordination, espeically for large-magnitude disasters such as NOLA,
and is tasked by law with that function. The Bush administration fails.
This, 
