DEMOCRACY:
Government & Politics | September 8, 2005
"WHAT
DIDN'T
GO
RIGHT?"
By
Douglas Drenkow, "Progressive
Thinking" As
Posted in "GordonTalk"
and "Comments
From Left Field"
On
Tuesday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi met with President
Bush in the White House. She
later recounted the meeting in a press conference.
Pelosi
said she had told Bush to his face that he should fire FEMA
Director Michael Brown.
She
said Bush replied, "Why would I do that?"
Stunned,
Pelosi said she told him, "Because of all that went wrong,
of all that didn't go right last week."
And
according to Representative Pelosi, President Bush replied,
"What didn't go right?"
My
God.
Just
let that sink in, like the bacteria of human waste and
decomposition that has sunk into the muddy swamp that was once
New Orleans.
"Oblivious,
in denial, dangerous" is how Ms. Pelosi characterized the
most powerful man in the world.
And
I think she was being gracious. She could just as well have
offered an alternative set of adjectives: Untruthful,
disingenuous, lying.
Of
course, the White House doesn't feel the need to be as gracious
as the Congresswoman from San Francisco. White House
spokesperson Scott McClellan
disputed
Pelosi's account of the meeting.
And
faced with this "contradiction", the mainstream media,
falling back on its journalistic ethics, has largely
ignored the outrageous, yet
very telling "What didn't go right?" remark by
Bush and simply reported that after Pelosi told him he should
fire Brown, "The president thanked me for my
suggestion."
My God.
And so the whitewash of the
black waters of bayou mass
manslaughter begins. Maybe that's what the White House means
about the "clean up" effort being a top priority now.
Of course, Ms. Pelosi might
actually be the untruthful one. Why should we not believe the
Administration's version of events?
The same Administration whose
Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said that the
federal response was "really exceptional" and that he
had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the
convention center who don't have food and water" -- when
every television viewer in the world was seeing and hearing the
horrors that very day.
The same Administration whose
Director of FEMA Michael Brown told Ted
Koppel that they were doing all the things that Koppel
reported for a fact that they were not doing, again evident to every TV viewer in the
world.
The same Administration whose
Director of FEMA Michael Brown told the world that "things
are going relatively well" the same day the mayor of
New Orleans was issuing a "desperate
SOS" to the world.
The same Administration whose
Director of FEMA Michael Brown said for the record that "the
evacuations of the hospitals...are going very well" at
the same time doctors
were retching in the treatment rooms and patients
were dying in the hallways and corpses were rotting in the
stairwells.
Yes, this is whom I believe,
the Administration of President George W. Bush.
The same President George W.
Bush who will be leading
the investigation into Katrina, as the GOP-controlled
Congress (also with blood on its hands, as for cutting the
funding for Louisiana flood-control projects) conducts its own
investigation, with, of course, more
Republicans than Democrats and no power of subpoena.
Then again, maybe these
investigations are but further examples of that wasteful
government spending the GOP loves to talk about (you know, funds
for New Orleans levees, Louisiana wetlands, or anything this side of
Baghdad).
After all, "What didn't go
right?"
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