Editor: Douglas Drenkow

V A L U E S   &   I S S U E S

Feedback

Legal Notices

Links of Interest

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?"  

Return to Archive of DEMOCRACY: Government & Politics

 


Home | Editor | Values & Issues | Feedback | Legal | Links