Bush & Co: Experts In Destruction

The big story on Bush today is that, despite the White House staff repeatedly blaming others for not advising them in a timely fashion, it turns out Bush had a video-conference with Director Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center on Sunday August 28th.

So much for the "nobody told me" defence... Here are a few others from Katrina Vanden Heuvel:

Blame the Victims: Both FEMA's Michael Brown and Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff, the Mutt and Jeff of this calamity, have blamed careless, destitute New Orleaners for not evacuating. "Those who got out are fine," Chertoff told NBC's Tim Russert. FEMA sought to excuse its delays in entering the city by blaming the looters.

Blame the Locals: In a stroke of political luck, both the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana's Governor are Democrats. As the New York Times reported, Karl Rove's PR strategy is to shift the blame to the state and city officials. All Sunday, White House officials and Fox News played this card. Expect more of this line of attack.

Blame the City: In perhaps the most bizarre excuse, Chertoff pointed the finger the city of New Orleans itself, saying, "It is a soup bowl. People have talked for years about whether it makes sense to have a city like that."

Blame the Media: Last week, Brown blamed media coverage for the perception that New Orleans had descended into lawlessness. "I actually think security is darn good.... It seems to me that every time a bad person wants to cause a problem, there's somebody with a camera to stick in their face."

Look on the Bright Side: As Americans continued to drown, Chertoff came up with this gem about the rescue efforts: "There were some things that actually worked very well. There were some things that didn't."

Ignoramus Defense: When FEMA's Brown, who was fired from his last job overseeing Arabian horse shows, said he was as "surprised as everybody else" to discover there were desperate people in the New Orleans convention center, CNN Soledad O'Brien asked, "How is it possible that we're getting better intel than you're getting?" But it was left up to our physically fit President for the whopper of the week: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Of course, we're not playing the "blame game", are we?

Meanwhile, the Bush Machine is preparing to destroy yet another city - Tal Afar (aka Tallafa) in Iraq. With the world's attention distracted, US forces have told everyone to evacuate the city ahead of their own man-made hurricane of violent weaponry.

And elsewhere, Bush & Co still plan to export the grinding poverty exposed in New Orleans to the rest of the world. Richard Butler, former UN official and head of the UN's Iraq WMD hunt, says US efforts to undermine the millennium development goals (aiming to cut global poverty in half by 2015) are a form of terrorism:

They're trying to destroy the document... All those words of substance are removed so it becomes 'we will do our best' to ... 'do the right thing', and anything of substance is sought to be removed...

Ten years ago I chaired the 50th anniversary of the UN and the Syrians were the terrorists, they tried to destroy the document. This time, the 60th anniversary, the terrorists seeking to destroy a declaration of all countries agreeing with each other is the United States.

As Dan Simpson says:

It is horrible to say, but the Bush administration's slow, inadequate, insensitive response to the tragedy in New Orleans makes what Bolton is doing in New York very clear: These people don't care about poor, non-white, sick, helpless people anywhere, not even in the United States. So how could anyone ever imagine that they would care about poor, non-white, sick, helpless people in the rest of the world?

And George Monbiot slams Sir Bob Geldoff for signing off prematurely on his Live8 PR stunt.